noteworthy apps - page 7

Calming Breath – Health & Fitness – Free

Breathing is simple, right? In, out, repeat? It is if you’re a normal, healthy person with a positive outlook on life and no major stress, but if you’re an anxiety-ridden mess like I am, you occasionally have some difficulty. Enter Calming Breath, a simple, one-screen app that sits you down and times your inhales and exhales. It works on a four-second inhale, six-second exhale system and includes an animation of a pair of lungs that fill and empty in time, if you’re a visual person. If you prefer to have your eyes closed, you can also set the app to vibrate at the beginnings and ends of breaths, and all of this sounds completely ridiculous, but if you’re in the middle of a panic attack, you need all the guidance you can get. Calming Breath is simple, easy, and it does what it needs to do.

Calming Breath

Backstep – Travel – Free

If you’ve ever traveled to an unfamiliar city, found a new café, or parked at a SuperTarget, you know the value of being able to get back to where you were. Backstep wants to help. It’s a new app by developer D Leak that lets you drop a waypoint at your current location with a single tap on your screen. You name the waypoint, then call up your various pins individually, and Backstep will show where you are in relation to it and update as you head back to your starting point. It’s a simple app with the cleanest of interfaces, and it might save you a few fights over which arbitrarily named row your car is in.

Backstep

InstaPhotoBlend – Photo & Video – $1.99

If you’ve ever looked at two of your photos and wished that you could somehow transmogrify them into one Frankenphoto, you might want to check out InstaPhotoBlend. It’s image-editing software for your iOS device that uses a simple interface to let you combine and blend two photos together. You start by selecting two pictures — one top layer and one bottom layer — and then fiddle around with the controls to control opacity and adjust color until you’ve created the perfect thing that used to be two things. After that, you can post your masterpiece to social media, email or text it, or just hang onto it until the time is right. It’s a fun little app to play with, and it’s not hard to create some interesting effects.

InstaPhotoBlend

There are a ton of apps out there, both free and paid, that may or may not be worth your time and money.

Why waste either one? With over 600,000 apps to choose from, finding the most interesting and worthwhile apps is, at best, a tricky activity and, at worst, a fool’s errand.

Might as well let us find the cool ones for you.

Here are a few of the favorites to come across our home screens this week —  including a running app, PumaTrac, photography apps Spark Camera and Perfect Shot and more.

Check ’em out:

PumaTrac – Health & Fitness – Free

For a change of pace from bloated running apps, try PumaTrac. It’s made just for runners, and it will track distance, pace, and calories burned over time. It also keeps a log of outside conditions like weather, day of the week, and location as well as music choices and social media activity to help you figure out how these things affect your running performance. Share your routes with your running buddies, as well, or just find routes other locals are using to keep your routine fresh. Oh, and it supports the Pebble watch, too.

PumaTrac


Spark Camera – Photo & Video – $1.99

If you’ve played with Vine, you’ll get Spark Camera right away. Here you get a 30-second limit for your mini video masterpiece. Adding a soundtrack via  your iTunes library  is also super easy and so is sharing with your friends across social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as via email and SMS. Just press and hold anywhere to record 720 p HD video then release to stop recording. Flip through a variety of live filter effects and then tap the note symbol to choose music.

Spark Camera


Listastic – Productivity – free

Listastic is a great little collaborative to-do list app with an intuitive interface that’s easy on the eyes. It’s simple to use, too, so you can share a grocery list with a roommate or life partner, a gift list with friends and family, or plan a project at work with a group of co-workers. You can become a Listastic premium member for a small fee, which lets you share any list with other Listastic members, free or paid. Free members can use Listastic on their own device, or join and edit shared lists from premium members. New users get a free two-week trial of Premium service, as well.

Listastic


WherezMyStuff – Utilities – $0.99

Aside from the unfortunate spelling of the name, WherezMyStuff is pretty handy. I have a habit of putting things away safely only to discover, many months later, that my perfect hiding place is unknown to even me.  WherezMyStuff is a mini-inventory to prevent this common mind melt. You simply name the item, type in (or record via the mic) where you’re putting it, and snap a picture. When you want to find your stuff again, tap the name or search and voila’ your treasures are found.

WherezMyStuff 


Perfect Shot – Photo & Video – $0.99

Ever taken a picture of a large group of people? It’s a huge a pain to get them all to smile at the same time, let alone refrain from blinking. Perfect Shot aims to make sure everyone in your group photo is smiling and their eyes are open with its face-detection technology. Aim your iPhone at the happy group and Perfect Shot will detect every face in the group choose the right moment and take the perfect picture–you don’t even have to press a button. Automagical, indeed.

Perfect Shot