iPhone apps - page 12

If you use Twitter a lot on your iPhone, you’ve probably heard of the Tweetbot app, a popular iOS Twitter client that was recently redesigned from the ground up for iOS 7.

Now in its third incarnation, Tweetbot 3 has just received a big update, adding a fistful of handy new features — including support for posting and viewing multiple images (although Tweetbot’s creators point out that these won’t show up on streaming timelines until Twitter adds support).

The app update also means that image detail views show the corresponding tweet when relevant, while Instagram videos are marked with a new “play” icon to make the user interface clearer.

Maybe you’ve just seen the latest X-Men film. A lot of people have, so odds are pretty good. And if it left you wanting to know more about the original Days of Future Past storyline, but tracking down the trade paperback and then, like, reading it sounds like a lot of work, here’s a game you’ll want to check out.

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past is out now for your favorite iOS device, and it aims to faithfully re-create the source material the way it originally appeared. This means that it’s the assassination of Senator Kelley that brings forth the robopocalypse (that character died in the first film, so he wasn’t available to die in the new one), and it’s Kitty Pryde, not Wolverine, who goes back in time to set things right.

Sure, you can play the whole game as Wolverine if you want, but if you’re a purist, you have a chance to do it “right.”

Whether you’re watching television at home or a new feature film at the movie theaters, popcorn always serves to be a tasty viewing companion. While popcorn is delicious there’s nothing more frustrating than smelling the buttery cooking kernels only to find it burnt when finished. Luckily the app Perfect Pop can save you from destroying your snack and filling your home with unpleasant smells.

Take a look at the video to see what you think.

I suck at table tennis. Like, it’s embarrassing.

I’m alright at serving, and I can usually return, but if anyone smashes at all or puts any spin on the ball, I fold faster than a laundry robot. I still like the idea of table tennis, though, which is why I’m glad we have video-game versions.

And Table Tennis Touch, which is out now for all of your iOS devices, is easily the best one I’ve ever played.

Maybe you have a busy life, and you need some help making time for the things that matter. Like, a lot of help. I’m talking about zero willpower here.

PlayTimer is for you. It locks your phone down but good so that you can play with your kid or focus on other things for a while. You just set the interval, press the cute smiley face, and you’re off. If you touch your phone, an alarm sounds unless you show the app your unlock key.

The unlock key is your child’s face, and that’s kinda weird, but I do like the idea.

Source:PlayTimer – Free | UNICEF Sverige

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.

With Gesture Alarm Clock, you set wakeup alerts by drawing numbers on the screen. It has a sleep timer that plays a variety of soothing music and sounds to lull you off. Plus, it has three different vibration strengths, several gesture-based snoozes, and if you think you’d wake up easier if your iPhone’s flashlight turned on, it’ll do that for you, too.

It will also automatically wake you up earlier if it detects traffic delays, and it displays the current weather.

But it won’t cook my breakfast, so I can’t really recommend it.

Source:Gesture Alarm Clock – Free ($1.99 upgrade for full features) | RV AppStudios LLC

I really can’t get enough of twin-stick shooters.

I don’t know what it is, but they have a very specific kind of frantic energy that appeals to me without being overwhelming. And I like them so much that every time I have an opportunity to play one on iOS, I give it a chance despite the fact that my iPhone has no sticks to twin, so the touch controls usually suck.

Ekon the Cyborg is a new two-pad shooter that somehow has controls that work. And I’m as shocked as anyone. But beyond that, it’s a nostalgic and colorful romp that is pretty much made of my childhood.

Here’s a fitness app with an interesting extra feature.

BetterFit lets you keep track of when and how you exercise. You can design custom routines from a giant list of activities or make your own. But it also includes a second tracker that lets you measure how much protein you consume during the day. It has a list of preset food items, or you can input it manually and set daily goals to make sure that you’re feeding your muscles properly.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go stock up on lentils because they’re as delicious and full of protein as they are fun to say.

Source:BetterFit – $1.99 | David Price

Here’s a quick, funny, and surprisingly challenging word game for movie buffs.

Plot Twistz presents you with a slightly modified plot to a famous film, and your job is to figure out the name of the augmented movie. You get the answer by changing one letter of the original title, which doesn’t sound like much, but you’d be surprised.

It’s also pretty hilarious if you love puns.

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.

Source:Countability – $0.99 | Bobinair

If you like rhythm games at all, stop reading right now and go download Record Run.

I can elaborate if you insist, but here’s what you need to know: It’s from the developer of Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central. It’s a colorful runner with simple gameplay and personality for days. And with a few taps, the game will make a level from any song stored on your iOS device.

Oh, and it’s free. Just go get it right now.

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.

I like looking at art, but I don’t always like going to galleries because my fellow patrons don’t usually appreciate my habit of giggling uncontrollably whenever I see pictures with naked butts in them.

And sometimes galleries are really far away, too. I probably should have just said that.

But Curiator puts a whole lot of art from all over right into your phone and lets you browse and giggle as much as you want without bothering anyone but your coworkers, roommates, or people on the bus. But you probably annoy them daily, anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter.

Source:Curiator – Free | Curiator

Wingsuit Cute is a game about a bunch of adorable animals forced to glide through the air and collect snacks while under the constant threat of smashing their widdle snoots on rocks and trees.

It really downplays the animals graphically smashing their faces open, but that’s basically what’s happening. The game takes a sunnier approach, choosing to focus on the part where tiny mammals don wingsuits in search of thrills and noms. And it’s really cute. And kinda fun, with a fair amount of challenge to keep perfect-run seekers coming back.

But it’s mostly cute.

TextSync is kind of a confusing app, and it took me a while to figure out what the point was. It lets you link your computer and your iPhone or iPad over Wi-Fi so that whatever you type on the big screen appears on the smaller one. You can then copy that text to paste elsewhere or save it as a note.

But what’s the point? Well, it’s a good workaround if you don’t want to spring for a Bluetooth keyboard, and it’s handy for these really long and tedious iMessages that I send all the time.

They’re epic, people. Blue boxes for days.

Source:TextSync – Free | Notable Group

Once again, I’m here to tell you about a little minimalist game that has completely kicked my ass.

It’s called Lumena, and it doesn’t look like much until you play it and fail in like two seconds. And then you try again, and again you fail because the game is, in fact, so minimal that it doesn’t even bother to tell you how to play it. But after a while, you figure it out (it’s not really that complicated), and with newly found confidence, you give it another shot. And you lose in five seconds.

But stick with it because it’s way better than I’m making it sound.

SAN FRANCISCO — Even in a town populated by ninjas, gurus and rockstars, Mario Estrada may have the coolest job around.

He’s the Director of Fun for digital photo app Hipstamatic and hopes you won’t hate him for it.

“Most people don’t believe that’s my job, but a lot of thought went into the title,” he says, enjoying the sun from the rooftop lounge of the startup’s SOMA headquarters. “Someone asked once why I wasn’t the VP of fun, but that implies there’s someone more fun than I am. And you can’t be the president of fun, because, actually, being president is never fun.”

When photojournalist Scott Strazzante planned a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., with his daughter Betsy in 2011, he was intent on leaving his cameras at home.

They were visiting colleges and he wanted it to be a “daddy-daughter” weekend. But the prolific, award-winning photographer gets anxious when he is not creating, so there was a point in the trip when he commandeered her iPhone, downloaded Hipstamatic and started making pictures.

As soon as he returned home, he purchased his own iPhone and it wasn’t long before the news photographer began making pictures for the first time that were truly about him.

His Instagram feed, a body of street photography images that grows larger by the day, has more than 19,000 followers. He loves how Instagram allows him to send pictures directly to people waiting and wanting to see them.

Cigar is a new aggregation app that pulls in new content from crowd-funding site Kickstarter, Netflix, TED Talks, and the App Store and presents it to you in a giant pile for your consideration. You run through them one at a time, swiping up to dismiss ones you don’t like and double-tapping to save some for later.

It can be a little daunting when it throws like 300 things on your stack. But Cigar also e-mails you a digest of things you liked, so you don’t have to go back to the app and sort through your “Liked” list again.

Which is nice.

Source:Cigar – Free | FiveIron Software, LLC

I’ve been playing video games for almost 30 years. I like to think that I’ve developed a certain level of hand-eye coordination and an ability to recognize patterns and learn rules reasonably quickly.

But Spirit Run: Fire vs. Ice, a new endless runner from developer Lunagames, made me question all of that. Suddenly, I was transforming when I wanted to jump, and jumping when I wanted to slide, and just falling the hell off of things that I normally wouldn’t.

That isn’t to say that it’s a bad game; it’s actually quite good. But be prepared to feel like a monkey trying to do algebra. You know, if that’s a thing that one might call upon monkeys to do.

Leo’s Fortune is one of those games that just makes you feel good. 

It definitely gave Apple the warm fuzzies: they chose the game, which looks like a mashup between a Pixar movie and a classic platformer from the Super Mario World era, as their first “game of the month” for iPhone.

Still reeling from the breakout success of the $4.99 game, designer Anders Hejdenberg spoke about the origins of Leo’s Fortune, why passion projects are best, how market research ruins creativity, and the reason the best teams are small ones. He also gave us exclusive access to pictures showing the game’s journey from page to iOS screen.

Want to find out more? In true platformer style, there’s more after the jump…

A lot of apps hope to inspire you to improve yourself and focus by offering you words of wisdom from people whose names you recognize. Like that rather stern one up there, which comes courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Maybe you’ll get something out of this app, which gives you a new quotation every day to make you work harder and feel better. But I’m going to use it to reply back to coworkers who have silly inspirational quotes in their e-mail signatures. It’s the ultimate passive-aggressive office way of saying, “Leave me alone, and get back to work.”

I’m sure my boss will love that.

Source:Daily Productivity Quotes – Free | Michael Paddock

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.

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 food (mostly desserts, oddly enough). What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.