I know I’ve said it before, but video games hate bricks.
And to that end, here’s yet another title about destroying those square bastards. It’s called Bricks, and it has a novel approach to smashing things that gets as fast-paced and exciting as it does embarrassing to be seen playing.
It’s probably not that bad if someone catches you, but you may raise some eyebrows. Here’s why.
Maybe you’re trying to quit smoking or drinking, or maybe you’re just curious how much coffee you drink or how often you go to the gym. You have to track all that stuff somewhere, and Countability wants to be that place.
You can add anything you want to keep track of and tick them off with just a swipe and a tap. It’ll handle the graphing and numbers for you, and you can look at daily, monthly, and annual numbers.
I haven’t really had that many bikini waxes, by the way. That’s just the number of times I’ve overheard people discussing them in public.
Hundreds of new games come out every week in the App Store. A select few are the next must-play title that everyone will be talking about (and ripping off) for the foreseeable future. Most of them are perfectly decent but may not receive the attention they deserve. And then you have the third group: games so odd, bizarre, and head-scratching that you’re not sure what to make of or do with them.
They aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just confusing and weird. And worst of all, people may never know that they exist. But that’s why we’re here.
Here are some of the strangest games to drop into the App Store this week, and they’re all about playing with fat stacks of cash. Or change. What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.
Here’s yet another artsy, minimalist puzzle game you’ll want to check out.
Bicolor gives you some colored blocks with numbers on them, and your job is to swipe them around to make the entire screen a single color. It sounds easy — and it typically is, if I’m honest — but it has moments of beauty and elegance that make you forget that it isn’t challenging you. And it’s fun enough without the head-scratching because, like all minimalist puzzle games, it’s about calm, man.
And as long as you keep that in mind, the two of you will get along just fine.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a place to keep your timers, some flirty pics, and the most extensive color app we’ve ever seen.
Here you go:
Emoji are versatile and cute, but if you want to get a little … direct with your significant other, you have to get pretty creative. SinkFoot wants to help with its small fleet of increasingly specific pictures that you can send via text or e-mail directly from the app. No nudity in here, but if you have a thing for cheerleaders, nurses, doctors, or members of SWAT, SinkFoot will help you communicate that.
Yep. SWAT. I guess that’s a thing.
Anyway, it has some other options, too. Although I’m not sure what this one means. I don’t really see what someone would do with an–Ooooooh. Alright, I get it.
Huh.
SinkFoot – $0.99 | SinkFoot LLC
Snoozing is great, but oversleeping isn’t. That’s why Alarm Clock Reboot approaches rousing you from your slumber in a different way. Instead of waking you up when you tell it to, it starts the process with a series of smaller alarms spread out before your wake time. You tell it when you want to wake up, and it starts the process before that with a series of snooze alarms that build in intensity until they reach your desired alarm time.
It’s a cool idea. The lens flares may be a bit much, but they are pretty sweet.
Alarm Clock Reboot – $0.99 | Every Penny Apps
A lot of apps will let you turn your iPhone into a scanner, but Scantilly lets you turn your snapshots into PDFs quickly and easily. All you do is take a picture of the thing you want to preserve, crop it down using a very simple tool, and then you can e-mail it to whomever you want. You can even add extra pages with a single tap, which is pretty handy if you have things to scan other than crudely drawn cartoons of dubious quality.
Not that I know anything about that.
This timer app might not be super useful for everyone, but if you have certain things that you time regularly, you might want to check it out. Scooby lets you build up a list of items and timers that you can easily access anytime you want to save yourself the slight inconvenience of setting the one on your iPhone.
I’m going to use it for the shared washer and dryer in my apartment building because neighbors appreciate it when people don’t leave their clothes in there forever, Steve.
Color Suite is a ridiculously comprehensive color-identification app with an easy sampling tool and a wealth of information. Just point the little dot at the color you want to identify, and it’ll tell you pretty much everything about it, including its complementary color, how it appears to eight different kinds of color-blindness, and even which Crayola is most similar.
It actually has an insanely long list of products you can match, like several brands of house paints, colored pencils, and make-up.
So basically, if you see a color, you can use that color for everything. This app really, really wants you to do that.
I like words. I like writing them, I like spelling them, and I like picking the perfect one for the sentence I’m creating. And I like playing with them, too, if you couldn’t tell from all the word games I choose for reviews.
But even if you aren’t a Word Nerd like I am, you’ll probably enjoy Fiasco. It’s a moderately paced competitive spelling game in which you create as many words of three or more letters as you can by dropping tiles, Tetris-style, onto a board.
You can get time and point bonuses for longer words, which is basically the only way to win. Because this game is pretty challenging.
Snoozing is great, but oversleeping isn’t. That’s why Alarm Clock Reboot approaches rousing you from your slumber in a different way. Instead of waking you up when you tell it to, it starts the process with a series of smaller alarms spread out before your wake time. You tell it when you want to wake up, and it starts the process before that with a series of snooze alarms that build in intensity until they reach your desired alarm time.
It’s a cool idea. The lens flares may be a bit much, but they are pretty sweet.
David is a brilliant and challenging game about a little square facing off against some giant, cheap-as-hell foes with nothing but a minimalist game version of a slingshot.
You can see what they’re going for here, but it’s more than just David and Goliath; this plucky little game reminded me a lot of Shadow of the Colossus, one of my favorite-ever PlayStation 2 games. It was also about a little guy killing giant things, but unlike that title, which is ambiguous about whether or not you should be destroying these beasts, David is pretty confident that these geometric a-holes gotta die.
And killing them will not be at all easy.
Emoji are versatile and cute, but if you want to get a little … direct with your significant other, you have to get pretty creative. SinkFoot wants to help with its small fleet of increasingly specific pictures that you can send via text or e-mail directly from the app. No nudity in here, but if you have a thing for cheerleaders, nurses, doctors, or members of SWAT, SinkFoot will help you communicate that.
Yep. SWAT. I guess that’s a thing.
Anyway, it has some other options, too. Although I’m not sure what this one means. I don’t really see what someone would do with an–Ooooooh. Alright, I get it.
Huh.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a timer inside of another timer, something to keep track of where you’ve been, and some fancy new fonts for your iWork.
Here you go:
It’s nice having some record of the places you’ve visited, but FourSquare is a little granular for my liking.
Traveler’s Badges keeps it simple and broad. You just let it detect your location, and it generates a unique badge for your current city that you can collect and add to your collection. It even logs the date and time you were there, in case anyone asks.
If you want to get all global with it, you can even display all of your badges on a map. It’s not the most practical app, but it is pretty cute (and free). And it’ll kill like five seconds of a layover. Every bit helps.
Traveler’s Badges – Free | Yangfan Qi
If you’re doing interval training or something else that requires you to time one thing and then another thing, like, right away, you might be interested in Practice Time. It’s a new app that lets you set up two countdowns and then run them consecutively. You can also tell it how many cycles to go through once you start.
It’s handy for timing exercise and then rest or if you want to be really persnickety about those instructions that tell you to leave soup in the microwave for a minute after it’s done cooking. And if you also timed the cooking concurrently with the microwave.
Nevermind; just use it for intervals.
Practice Time – Free | Mal Function
Sometimes, you’re just typing an e-mail or note on your iPhone, and you realize that you have no idea how to spell the next word you want to use. It could be genuine ignorance, it could be a brain fart, but the person on the other end isn’t going to care why; they’ll just notice the mistake.
Spell Checker wants to help you out. It accesses your onboard dictionary to keep you from looking dumb. And because it uses the built-in resources, it even works offline.
You know, in case you’re writing an e-mail in a cave that you would want to send after you left the cave. It could happen.
Spell Checker – Free | Paradigm Agnostic
Your iPhone and iPad already have some fonts on board, but what if you want to make something that looks like it was stenciled or written in cursive? Or maybe you just like knowing that you have like 800 typefaces to choose from, just in case? Install New Fonts has you covered with enough options to keep you out of trouble for a while.
It’s free to download, but most of it is locked behind a $2.99 in-app purchase. But everything’s licensed for commercial use, so think of it as an investment.
Install New Fonts – Free | Denis Tokarev
Every once in a while, I find an app that shows me just how much I need it. This time, it’s Keep Calm and Breathe On, which offers you seven guided breathing exercises (based on cycles per minute). The goal is to relax you and “calm your heart activity,” and when I tried it out for this write-up, I realized that I’m apparently really bad at breathing.
It has two sounds to accompany your oxygenation: Wind and River. I preferred the wind. It just made more sense because if I’m in a river, breathing might be a problem. And that’s less than calming.
