noteworthy apps - page 4

Bed Bug Proof — Utilities — Free

America is seeing a resurgence in bed-bug infestations, and here’s an app to help you screen a room and identify the little biters before they introduce themselves.

To be perfectly clear, Bed Bug Proof is an app created in part to sell an anti-bed-bug spray. But the practical information and tools it provides, like the inspection guide, comparison photographs, and a magnifier/light to let you use your phone to search for eggs and poop, are useful enough to let it stand on its own.

Although it will make you itchy just looking at it. Seriously.

Bed Bug Proof – Terramera Inc.

Numerus — Reference — Free

Numerus is one of those weird apps that shouldn’t be as interesting as it is. But once you spend a little time clicking around it, you will feel the random knowledge dropping into your head.

Did you know that in 1950, the Canadian postal system processed 1,362,310,155 items? I don’t know why you would, but you do now. Also, the human body has 248 organs, there were 129 episodes of the CBS sitcom Becker, and China contains 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. I can’t stop.

Alright, maybe one more.

Is that a Bill and Ted reference in there? This app is amazing.

Numerus: Fun Facts About Numbers – Clover Studio Ltd.

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 some interactive art, a quick way to exchange contact information, and a really rude personal trainer.

Here you go:

Slip — Utilities — Free

Slip knows that exchanging business cards can be annoying. You have to find your cards and then take theirs and then maybe jam it into the back of the thing where you keep your cards, and hopefully it fits. And then later, you find their card and can’t remember why you’d met in the first place.

So instead of that, Slip uses Bluetooth to exchange contact information wirelessly. You go in and toggle which bits of information you want to share and just flip it over to another user with a single swipe. You can also text or e-mail it to people without Slip, but that’s not as much fun.

Slip – Yodel Code

CARROT Fit — Health & Fitness — $1.99

It isn’t hard to find a fitness app that offers enthusiastic and positive encouragement to keep you motivated and working toward your goals. CARROT Fit is not one of those apps.

Following its predecessors, CARROT To-Do and CARROT Alarm, Fit brings the you-deprecating artificial intelligence program to bear on your weight-loss plan. You set your goal, and “she” gives you points and virtual medals for doing well and mocks you if you don’t. It’s basically like if GLaDOS, the comical, murderous A.I. from developer Valve’s Portal series, were sent to whip you into shape.

By which I mean that CARROT Fit is kind of amazing.

CARROT Fit – Talking Weight Tracker

Phone Price — Reference — Free

If you’re due for an upgrade to your iPhone, you might be wondering what to do with your current one. You could go to a bunch of different websites and search for buyback values or try to just sell it yourself, but that sounds like a lot of work, and living in the future like we do means things should be easy.

Phone Price is an app that aggregates phone trade-in values from a variety of sources so that you can get the most for your old device. So you’re basically making the phone a party to its own rejection and disposal, and that’s pretty cold.

Phone Price – K Mobile Solutions

iHud — Utilities — Free

You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.

iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.

I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.

iHud – Anders Sperling

Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free

Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.

The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution in real time.

It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén

Contact Alias — Utilities — Free

People love their privacy, but you can’t play Phone Goalie all the time. What if there were some way to hide who your iMessages and texts are coming from, even if whichever nosy person you’re with is looking right at your screen?

Enter Contact Alias, an app that lets you set alternate names for anyone on your list and toggle them on and off with a single touch of a comically large button. I’m sure it has practical applications for sneaky sneakers, but I’m probably just going to use it to quickly change people’s contact names to “A**hole” when I’m mad at them.

Contact Alias – Ryan Siegel

Contact Alias — Utilities — Free

People love their privacy, but you can’t play Phone Goalie all the time. What if there were some way to hide who your iMessages and texts are coming from, even if whichever nosy person you’re with is looking right at your screen?

Enter Contact Alias, an app that lets you set alternate names for anyone on your list and toggle them on and off with a single touch of a comically large button. I’m sure it has practical applications for sneaky sneakers, but I’m probably just going to use it to quickly change people’s contact names to “A**hole” when I’m mad at them.

Contact Alias – Ryan Siegel

Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free

Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.

The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution happen in real time.

It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén

iHud — Utilities — Free

You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.

But iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.

I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.

iHud – Anders Sperling

Phone Price — Reference — Free

If you’re due for an upgrade to your iPhone, you might be wondering what to do with your current one. You could go to a bunch of different websites and search for buyback values or try to just sell it yourself, but that sounds like a lot of work, and living in the future like we do means things should be easy.

Phone Price is an app that aggregates phone trade-in values from a variety of sources so that you can get the most for your old device. So you’re basically making the phone party to its own rejection and disposal, and that’s pretty cold.

Phone Price – K Mobile Solutions

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 some collectors of videos and interesting articles, an app to help you get better sleep, and another that might give you something to do while you’re doing that.

Here you go:

Spender: Expenses Only — Finance — Free $0.99 [thanks, commenters]

If I want to be reductionist here, money management has two general components: maximizing income and minimizing expenses. For many people, the second part is more difficult because sometimes you really, absolutely need to own that box set of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Spender: Expenses Only is a quick and easy way to itemize and organize your bills, and it even tells you how much you’re spending on average daily. And once you look at your costs in that vacuum and see just how much you’re blowing on Pez and action figures without seeing the income to offset it, you might want to change some things.

Spender – Expenses Only

Inlight — Lifestyle — Free

If you have a few minutes to stare at your phone, and you don’t really feel like watching a video, you might want to look into Inlight. It’s a really good-looking app that collects articles from the Internet in one place and lets you browse by categories like “Me Time” and “Nourish.”

So that’s a little weird, but I found a lot of interesting stuff in there. For example, now I know, as a man, which 21 compliments I crave. And that’s just news I can use.

Inlight

5by — Entertainment — Free

Everyone likes funny and/or interesting videos from the Internet, but who has time to go look for them? Especially when you just have a few minutes to kill while you take care of business in your “second office?” StumbleUpon is here to help with 5by.

The video aggregating app has been out for a little while, but it just got a shiny, updated look that makes it look all current and fabulous. You can find videos based on what you’re doing and how long you have, and it’ll just stream them along to you. So don’t worry; you don’t have to just sit there staring at your shoes anymore.

Or like your knees, or whatever.

5by

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi — Sports — Free

The 2014 Winter Olympics are coming up fast, and if you feel like a bad American for not having any idea who is competing on our various national teams, The U.S. Olympic Committee has an app for you.

Here in one simple interface, you can find athlete bios, news, team rosters, and more handy information to prepare you to watch people in ridiculous shape do incredible things while you sit on your couch and create new and elaborate curses for various judges.

It’s the true spirit of the Olympics, really.

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi

Best Sleep Hygiene — Health & Fitness — Free

Alright, so “sleep hygiene” is kind of a weird way of describing one’s sleeping habits, but this is a pretty useful app, regardless.

It starts out with a questionnaire that asks about your pre-bed routine, including how much TV you watch, alcohol consumption, and when you ate your last full meal, and then it ranks your results and offers suggestions for how you might make your sleepytime more effective.

My results put me in the bottom 25 percent of respondents, which is probably why I spend all day lapsing in and out of consciousnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn–huh? I’m up. What are we doing?

Best Sleep Hygiene

Lucid Dream Ultimate — Utilities — Free

While you’re getting all that sleep we talked about in the last app, you might as well pay some attention to your dreams.

Lucid Dream Ultimate is a dream journal and reality checker that plays a noise during the day that cues you to remind yourself that you’re awake. It’ll send you the same noise throughout the night; the idea is that when you hear the noise in your dream, you’ll realize you’re dreaming, and then you can start the important business of conjuring up all the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephants you’ve ever wanted.

Plus one of the tones is an Inception-esque “BWAAAAAAAH,” and that’s just straight-up magical.

Lucid Dream Ultimate

Slip — Utilities — Free

Slip knows that exchanging business cards can be annoying. You have to find your cards and then take theirs and then maybe jam it into the back of the thing where you keep your cards, and hopefully it fits. And then later, you find their card and can’t remember why you’d met in the first place.

So instead of that, Slip uses Bluetooth to exchange contact information wirelessly. You go in and toggle which bits of information you want to share and just flip it over to another user with a single swipe. You can also text or e-mail it to people without Slip, but that’s not as much fun.

Slip – Yodel Code

Lucid Dream Ultimate — Utilities — Free

While you’re getting all that sleep we talked about in the last app, you might as well pay some attention to your dreams.

Lucid Dream Ultimate is a dream journal and reality checker that plays a noise during the day that cues you to remind yourself that you’re awake. It’ll send you the same noise throughout the night; the idea is that when you hear the noise in your dream, you’ll realize you’re dreaming, and then you can start the important business of conjuring up all the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephants you’ve ever wanted.

Plus one of the tones is an Inception-esque “BWAAAAAAAH,” and that’s just straight-up magical.

Lucid Dream Ultimate

Best Sleep Hygiene — Health & Fitness — Free

Alright, so “sleep hygiene” is kind of a weird way of describing one’s sleeping habits, but this is a pretty useful app, regardless.

It starts out with a questionnaire that asks about your pre-bed routine, including how much TV you watch, alcohol consumption, and when you ate your last full meal, and then it ranks your results and offers suggestions for how you might make your sleepytime more effective.

My results put me in the bottom 25 percent of respondents, which is probably why I spend all day lapsing in and out of consciousnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn–huh? I’m up. What are we doing?

Best Sleep Hygiene

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi — Sports — Free

The 2014 Winter Olympics start in just a week and a half, and if you feel like a bad American for not having any idea who is competing on our various national teams, The U.S. Olympic Committee has an app for you.

Here in one simple interface, you can find athlete bios, news, team rosters, and more handy information to prepare you to watch people in ridiculous shape do incredible things while you sit on your couch and create new and elaborate curses for various judges.

It’s the true spirit of the Olympics, really.

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi

Inlight — Lifestyle — Free

If you have a few minutes to stare at your phone, and you don’t really feel like watching a video, you might want to look into Inlight. It’s a really good-looking app that collects articles from the Internet in one place and lets you browse by categories like “Me Time” and “Nourish.”

So that’s a little weird, but I found a lot of interesting stuff in there. For example, now I know, as a man, which 21 compliments I crave. And that’s just news I can use.

Inlight

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 another cool timer, a money-saving challenge, and a thing to help you unwind.

Here you go:

52 Weeks Money Challenge — Finance — Free

If you haven’t heard of the 52 Weeks Money Challenge, you probably don’t have a Facebook account. And I envy you for that.

Anyway, the challenge is a way to help you build up a nest egg through regimented saving. You put away one dollar the first week, two dollars the second, and so on. At the end of 52 weeks, you’ve set aside a total of $1,378. This app tracks your progress and grand total, and it will even send you weekly reminders in case you’re the forgetful type.

52 Weeks Money Challenge

Relaxatron — Entertainment — Free

People keep telling me I’m too highly strung, which is probably why I keep finding relaxation apps to write up. It might also be why I just yelled at my TV for 15 minutes for refusing to contain any episodes of Quantum Leap.

Anyway, Relaxatron has two things going for it: a badass name and a little more interaction than some of those other calming apps. You create a “seed shape” by placing dots into a grid, and then you just tap the screen and watch calming patterns emerge, and …

That was two hours ago.

Relaxatron

Night Sky Guide 3D+ — Reference — $1.99

Alright, this one’s really cool.

Sometimes, I’m outside at night (fewer bees then), and I’ll see something in the sky and think, “Is that a planet, or should I call NASA and tell them that we’re all probably about to die?”

Night Sky Guide 3D+ will save me a lot of embarrassing phone conversations with scientists. It uses your iOS device’s GPS and compass, so you can just hold it up and it’ll show you a notated view of the patch of sky you’re facing.

So it was just Jupiter. Sorry, NASA operator.

Night Sky Guide 3D+

Tico Timer — Education — $0.99

Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.

The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.

Tico Timer

Spender: Expenses Only — Finance — Free $0.99 [thanks, commenters]

If I want to be reductionist here, money management has two general components: maximizing income and minimizing expenses. For many people, the second part is more difficult because sometimes you really, absolutely need to own that box set of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Spender: Expenses Only is a quick and easy way to itemize and organize your bills, and it even tells you how much you’re spending on average daily. And once you look at your costs in that vacuum and see just how much you’re blowing on Pez and action figures without seeing the income to offset it, you might want to change some things.

Spender – Expenses Only

Tico Timer — Education — $0.99

Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.

The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.

Tico Timer

Night Sky Guide 3D+ — Reference — $1.99

Alright, this one’s really cool.

Sometimes, I’m outside at night (fewer bees then), and I’ll see something in the sky and think, “Is that a planet, or should I call NASA and tell them that we’re all probably about to die?”

Night Sky Guide 3D+ will save me a lot of embarrassing phone conversations with scientists. It uses your iOS device’s GPS and compass, so you can just hold it up and it’ll show you a notated view of the patch of sky you’re facing.

So it was just Jupiter. Sorry, NASA operator.

Night Sky Guide 3D+

Relaxatron — Entertainment — Free

People keep telling me I’m too highly strung, which is probably why I keep finding relaxation apps to write up. It might also be why I just yelled at my TV for 15 minutes for refusing to contain any episodes of Quantum Leap.

Anyway, Relaxatron has two things going for it: a badass name and a little more interaction than some of those other calming apps. You create a “seed shape” by placing dots into a grid, and then you just tap the screen and watch calming patterns emerge, and …

That was two hours ago.

Relaxatron

52 Weeks Money Challenge — Finance — Free

If you haven’t heard of the 52 Weeks Money Challenge, you probably don’t have a Facebook account. And I envy you for that.

Anyway, the challenge is a way to help you build up a nest egg through regimented saving. You put away one dollar the first week, two dollars the second, and so on. At the end of 52 weeks, you’ve set aside a total of $1,378. This app tracks your progress and grand total, and it will even send you weekly reminders in case you’re the forgetful type.

52 Weeks Money Challenge

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 quick slide-show creator, an app that will help you snag some wheels, and more data than you require.

Here you go:

Presentics — Productivity — Free ($9.99 unlock)

If you have a presentation to prepare at the last minute or you think PowerPoint is too clunky, you might want to look at Presentics. It’s an iPad app that will help you make a minimalist slide show quickly and easily. It just takes a few taps and some typing, and you’ll have a quick, clean project. You can also embed images, audio, and video right inside the app if you want to go all multimedia on it.

You have access to everything in the free version, but the $9.99 unlock lets you save more than two projects and share over the cloud.

Presentics

Cold Tires — Utilities — Free

If you prefer to add air to your favorite vehicle’s radials in the comfort of your own garage, you might be interested in Cold Tires. It’s a quick and simple calculator that will automatically compensate for the temperature difference between where you put the air in and where you’ll actually be driving. Meaning outside. Where it’s probably freezing. Because winter.

Just add a few bits of data, and the app will tell you how much extra air to add to make sure the pressure stays where you want it.

Cold Tires

Puzzle Sidekick — Reference — Free

Puzzle Sidekick is an ambitious app that hopes to serve as a reference guide for people who do crosswords, augmented-reality games, puzzle-driven scavenger hunts, and whichever other situations one might need a working knowledge of semaphore.

It also contains guides to codemaking (and breaking), information on our solar system, and a couple dozen other random topics that I can’t even remember right now. So even if you’re not following a puzzle trail anytime soon, it’s still an interesting collection of random information that’s worth a look.

Puzzle Sidekick

Legítimo — Productivity — Free

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to get something in writing, like if you and your roommate agree to split utilities in exchange for the right to have pizza and wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Crucial dealings like those are the sorts of things you bring ink and paper in on. But what if you don’t know how to speak Official-Sounding Legal Document?

Legítimo is here to help. You can use it to draw up loan agreements, leases, sales and purchases, and service contracts and even sign them in the app. And everyone gets a copy via e-mail or text.

Also, help me figure out which category that utilities/Pizza Day deal falls under. No reason.

Legítimo

Bykes — Travel — Free

Bike-sharing programs are popping up all over the world now, and here’s an app to help you navigate some of them. Bykes will help you find stations for 11 bike fleets in five countries (more to come). In addition to just showing you where the depots are, it will also tell you how many bikes are there and how many stalls are available for those looking to return their borrowed wheels.

So if you live in — or are visiting — Dublin, London, Brisbane, Melbourne, Boulder, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, the District of Columbia, Montreal, or Toronto, you’re all set. If not, just wait or drive, I guess.

Bykes

Bykes — Travel — Free

Bike-sharing programs are popping up all over the world now, and here’s an app to help you navigate some of them. Bykes will help you find stations for 11 bike fleets in five countries (more to come). In addition to just showing you where the depots are, it will also tell you how many bikes are there and how many stalls are available for those looking to return their borrowed wheels.

So if you live in — or are visiting — Dublin, London, Brisbane, Melbourne, Boulder, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, the District of Columbia, Montreal, or Toronto, you’re all set. If not, just wait or drive, I guess.

Bykes

Legítimo — Productivity — Free

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to get something in writing, like if you and your roommate agree to split utilities in exchange for the right to have pizza and Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Crucial dealings like those are the sorts of things you bring ink and paper in on. But what if you don’t know how to speak Official-Sounding Legal Document?

Legítimo is here to help. You can use it to draw up loan agreements, leases, sales and purchases, and service contracts and even sign them in the app. And everyone gets a copy via e-mail or text.

Also, help me figure out which category that utilities/Pizza Day deal falls under. No reason.

Legítimo

Puzzle Sidekick — Reference — Free

Puzzle Sidekick is an ambitious app that hopes to serve as a reference guide for people who do crosswords, augmented-reality games, puzzle-driven scavenger hunts, and whichever other situations one might need a working knowledge of semaphore.

It also contains guides to codemaking (and breaking), information on our solar system, and a couple dozen other random topics that I can’t even remember right now. So even if you’re not following a puzzle trail anytime soon, it’s still an interesting collection of random information that’s worth a look.

Puzzle Sidekick

Cold Tires — Utilities — Free

If you prefer to add air to your favorite vehicle’s radials in the comfort of your own garage, you might be interested in Cold Tires. It’s a quick and simple calculator that will automatically compensate for the temperature difference between where you put the air in and where you’ll actually be driving. Meaning outside. Where it’s probably freezing. Because winter.

Just add a few bits of data, and the app will tell you how much extra air to add to make sure the pressure stays where you want it.

Cold Tires

Presentics — Productivity — Free ($9.99 unlock)

If you have a presentation to prepare at the last minute or you think PowerPoint is too clunky, you might want to look at Presentics. It’s an iPad app that will help you make a minimalist slide show quickly and easily. It just takes a few taps and some typing, and you’ll have a quick, clean project. You can also embed images, audio, and video right inside the app if you want to go all multimedia on it.

You have access to everything in the free version, but the $9.99 unlock lets you save more than two projects and share over the cloud.

Presentics