Angry Birds and Words With Friends getting tiresome? Here are five new smartphone apps waiting to take center stage on your touch screen.
Little Things Forever - KLICKTOCK
Little Things Forever is a fun and addictive seek game reminiscent of “I SPY.” Each stage gives the player a large image made up of smaller, cluttered items they must search through to find certain items specified in a randomly generated list. If you can find all the objects on the list, you complete the stage. Sometimes stages will have a two-minute timer, but most give you unlimited time to search.
Completing the stage in a timely manner without making too many mistakes will reward you with a puzzle piece. Puzzle pieces unlock new stages to search through. Being able to collect puzzle pieces and unlock new stages keeps the game from getting old, and the randomly generated search lists also make sure it doesn’t get repetitive.
The only downside to this app is that the more stages you unlock, the more puzzle pieces it will take to advance to the next stage, meaning the more time you will have to spend in stages you’ve already played. In these longer stretches between new stages, the game play can start to feel repetitive, especially in one sitting.
All in all, Little Things forever is a great game to play in short chunks of time and is so addictive that you may find yourself searching items longer than expected.
Repix - Sumoing Ltd
From the makers of Sumo Paint comes Repix. This is a fun, creative app that allows you to be an artist and a photo editor at the same time. Free to download, Repix provides you with nine different “style brushes” you control with your fingers to add different effects and styles to your images, with the option to purchase additional brushes.
In addition to the style brushes, Repix also includes certain photo editing options such as cropping, brightness, saturation and more.
Repix allows you to take a photo in the app and begin remixing it right away, edit pictures already on your device, and lets you access your Facebook photos. Once you’ve completed your masterpiece, Repix makes it easy for you to upload your creation to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. It also allows you to save pictures to your camera roll or send them via email.
Being able to apply styles and effects hands-on gives you the ability to determine exactly where and how you want to affect the photo. This allows for much more freedom and creativity than apps that only offer preset filters that affect the whole photo.
Haiku Deck - Giant Thinkwell
Haiku Deck is a presentation app designed to help you share your ideas and tell your stories. It’s similar to programs such as PowerPoint. Like PowerPoint, Haiku Deck offers a variety of themes and layouts and allows you to incorporate text, images, lists, charts and graphs into a presentation. You can convert it into a downloadable PDF to print and handout.
What makes Haiku Deck different from and better than most presentation programs is that it doesn’t over burden you with too many options or layouts you have to fine-tune to look right. Haiku Deck is designed to limit your text, keeping each slide focused on one idea, a key aspect to a good slide-based presentation.
You can use your own images from your camera roll or from a variety of other image sharing services such as Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. Haiku Deck also gives you access to millions of creative commons, beautiful, free to use images directly through a search field in the app.
Haiku Deck offers a variety of ways to share your presentation. You can save to the Web and view on any Web-enabled device, embed it into blogs and websites or share it through social networking sites. You can even export to PowerPoint or Keynote.
With a sleek and beautiful design of its own, this app offers plenty of fun and simple ways to create a stylish presentation.
Hukkster - Hukkster
Hukkster is one of the coolest tools for online shopping I have ever seen. I don’t shop that much and I still think it’s awesome. This app lets you browse all your favorite online stores from the convenience of your iPad and “hukk” items you like. You can organize your hukks into lists to make comparing similar products easy. Hukkster will even notify you when your hukks go on sale or drop in price.
Hukkster seems like it was made for online clothes shopping, but you can use it to shop for almost anything. In addition to being an iPad app, Hukkster can also be downloaded onto your computer. It lives in your Internet browser, allowing you to hukk items no matter where you’re shopping online.
Hukkster is perfect for browsing, organizing, tracking and buying the items you love, and, to an extent, puts you in control of what you want to spend.
Wunderlist - 6 Wunderkinder
Wunderlist is a simple app that makes it easy to manage tasks and goals through the creation of simple to-do lists. Create lists for day-to-day tasks or long term plans. Make wish lists, grocery lists, a list of homework assignments or keep a list of personal memos. You can share your lists with friends, family and colleagues, providing a great way for you coordinate tasks with others. Wunderlist is versatile, allowing you to use it in whatever way works best for you.
Wunderlist has several features that help you get the most out of your lists, including reminders, subtasks, setting items to recur and note taking. The ability to make any list, no matter how big or small, makes Wunderlist a great place to organize and plan for every area of your life.
This app is available on Apple, Windows and Android devices.
