Yes, things have been a bit slow around here — not that the world of iPhone and iPod Touch news has been slow by any means, but with Jody currently being away, Adam having only just gotten back from a whirlwind west-coast tour, and me having my head stuck in the creation of the Snapture screenshot contest and review non-stop for four days, there’s been scant time for anything else. Fortunately, the App Store has been nice over the past 5 days and released only 41 new freebies for me to dig through. As always, some good, some bad, and some that make you want to introduce your forehead to your desk. Repeatedly.
This edition of the Free App Store Review is brought to you in part by the Snapture screenshot contest because I said so.
App Name: iMprint
Developer: DShaffer
Category: Entertainment
Episode 304 of the My First iPhone App series brings you iMprint, a simple app that displays images of various optical illusions and what seem to be messy Rorschach blots, ostensibly to “test your brain” to see “how well your brain can interpret pictures.” Not that it will score you on anything, except maybe how willing you are to download apps you’ll run approximately once — for that, you get a cookie. A wasabi cookie.
App Name: Tipper
Developer: Siddarth Ram
Category: Utilities
An app that displays pictures of Tipper Gore naked. Okay, not really, but that would be more interesting than yet another tip calculator — and remember we’re talking about Tipper Gore here, which should give you a good indication of how interested I am in reviewing the fourth or fifth tip calculator to appear in the App Store. And yes, the screenshot is extra wide. This is presumably a subliminal accusation that your fat ass eats out too much. And it’s right, dammit. Oh God, I hate myself.
App Name: Grocery Gadget
Developer: Flixoft, Inc.
Category: Productivity
Yes. Yes, it is another shopping list app. But you know what? This one isn’t bad. Not bad at all. I may even venture to say that it’s the best shopping list app I’ve seen. It’s well presented and well appointed with features I have yet to see in any other shopping list. You can create lists from scratch, or open an existing list and modify it; you can arrange items in your list based on where they’re located around your house, in case you’re the sort of person who prepares a shopping list by going through your kitchen and seeing what you need more of. Even better, when you’re at the supermarket, Grocery Gadget pays attention to what order you checked items off your list in, and next time will sort the items in that order so that next time you make a list, the items you picked up last time will sort themselves in the order of the aisles in which you found them, making your shopping trip much more organized and easy to manage. Now, that’s pretty damn cool — and you would think something as mundane as a shopping list app would impress me, but there’s even more! You can take photos of items, scale them, and have them display next to the items in your list so you have visual cues to go along with the text list. This is especially handy if you find you have to ask a stock drone where an item is and can show them a picture. It even comes pre-stocked with an extensible list over 1,200 items — and the items are even categorized by the section of the grocery store they’re found in. For a shopping list app, Grocery Gadget impresses in unexpected ways.
ObjectGraph LLC
Category: Entertainment
As long as I live, I will never,
never understand some aspects of Japanese culture. From my round-eyed, pasty white Western perspective, much of what is considered entertainment in the land of the rising sun strikes me at impossibly odd angles, and all I can do is let my face slacken into a rictus of incredulity, shake my head, and blow-dry my brain in an attempt to reconstitute it into some level of jelly-like consistency. Take Hee Button for a very small example. “Hee” apparently means something analagous to “Gotcha,” and it is evidently from a famous Japanese game show that I assume had something to do with trivia. This app, I presume, is intended to bring a little of that I-know-the-answer button smacking “hee” to the iPhone. According to the description, you’re supposed to smack the button as many times as an obscure fact you encounter impresses you. “A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body” is apparently worth 15 “hee” to the author on the grounds that it is a more impressive factoid than “A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime,” which is only worth a mere 8 “hee.” However much it impresses you, that’s how many times you smack the Hee Button, up to a maximum to 20 “hee,” which is apparently the most impressive anything can possibly be. According to the author, that’s “A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.” Psh. That’s nothing. You should see my– hey, look, a chameleon! It may or may not be worth noting that the Hee Button makes a noise that sounds like the final wearied honk of a dying goose. It
is worth noting that it makes my cats go nuts trying to figure out what the hell is making that tortured noise.
App Name: iFlipr Lite
Developer: 10 Startups
Category: Education
A scaled down version of a flashcard app. Content is downloadable from iFlipr.com, with the added bonus that you can create your own flashcard decks, which is a rather nice feature, though whether it’s worth the sawbuck they’ll ding you for the full version is your call. The lite version only lets you download decks of 10 cards or less, and gives you access to one full featured deck. Not a bad educational app, and the price isn’t way out there I suppose, though it toes the line.
App Name: Ruler Plus
Developer: Bananas Design
Category: Utilities
A to-scale ruler for measuring things, which is what rulers generally do when they’re not hitting that spot you can never reach on your back whenever you have an itch there. You can kinda-sorta extend the ruler by marking off the end with something, moving the device up, and pressing the + button to virtually slide the ruler measurements up the scale. Probably handy if you’re somewhere that you need a lateral measuring device and only have your phone with you. Otherwise, the folks at Selectum probably aren’t too concerned that this freebie will cut into their business.
App Name: Rulla
Developer: Lingon i Korg Creations
Category: Lifestyle
In the event that the classic jailbreak-cum-App-Store app
LED banner (Banner Free) just isn’t Arial Black enough for you, Rulla (Swedish for “Common Sens—” wait, no, that’s Ikea. Oh, here it is: “To Roll”) steps in to give you a banner app with configurable colour schemes and extended character support — because it is important to be able to warn people that you’re standing in a radiation zone from afar.
App Name: Word Party Lite
Developer: GingerMonkey Games
Category: Games
World Party is the first exclusively multiplayer party game for the iPhone and Touch, and is pretty well in the same vein as Password, Taboo and Catch Phrase. Get a bunch of people together — preferably drunk if you want some
real fun, split into two teams, and take turns being the one giving your teammates clues in an attempt to get them to blurt out the secret word associated with those clues. The catch is that you are given a list of obvious clues that you
can’t say. Once a word is guessed, pass it around to the next playerWhoever gets their team to guess the words in the shortest time wins. Graphically, the game presents itself in a fun, colourful, pencil crayon motif with colour-coded “Hello, my name is…” style nametags denoting the teams. The game features both beginner and advanced play modes to suit you. Neither the App Store descriptions nor anything in the game itself seems to be able to tell me what the difference between the Lite and $4.99 pay versions is, so I’m just going to go ahead and assume that the Lite version features 50% less Groucho Marx and no celebratory pie for the winning team.
App Name: Constitution
Developer: Clint Bagwell Consulting
Category: Reference
I’m sorry. I’m not usually one to rib people about their given names, but Clint Bagwell has to be one of the most unfortunate names I’ve seen in a long time. Either that or one of the best porn star names ever — for a woman. Anyway, the full title of this is, rather redundantly, “Constitution for iPhone and iPod Touch.” It is, as you might have surmised, a digital copy of the United States Constitution, and now that I have it, I know that I can exercise my 28th amendment rights to bag on Clint’s name.
App Name: Cowabunga
Developer: Sputnik Games
Category: Games
Here is your Words You’ve Never Used Together In A Sentence Before Of The Day: Bouncing cows. That’s the object of Cowabunga. Move your paddle across the screen as suicidal cows leap off the edges of cliffs your left and trampoline them over to the right without dunking them in the drink. Simple yet effective cartoon graphics make it look appealing, but poor controls (shoehorned accelerometer and standard touch control are both available — simultaneously) and a difficulty level that starts just this side of slow-the-hell-down have earned this one the Big Wiggly X on my springboard.
App Name: JustUpdate
Developer: Patrick Quinn-Graham
Category: Social Networking
For those of you who get your Twitter updates via SMS, but who don’t want to have to pay exorbitant text messaging fees to send SMS updates back, JustUpdate is JustTheThing: All it does is send updates to your Twitter. That’s it. Nothing more.
App Name: Manaus
Developer: Fernando Pereira
Category: Lifestyle
A very simple book searching app to search for, y’know, those paper things with words all over them. The author states, “Currently to reduce resources consumption, each search is limited to 10 book.” LOL WUT? Ignoring the plural-singular dichotomy there, whose resources? And why?
App Name: Ball in a Cup Lite
Developer: JOHN MOFFETT
Category: Games
Hey, kids of America! It’s hand-painted wooden
Ball in a Cup! Who needs constant electronic stimulation when there’s Ball in a Cup? Hey, wait. This is
both! It’s
electronic Ball in a Cup! Is that legal? Well JOHN MOFFETT thinks it is — so much so that HIS NAME IS ALL IN CAPS. But never mind that non-sequitur. Ball in a Cup is all about catching a ball in a cup. Rotate your device to move the ball around, then try to catch it in the cup, but be careful not to get the ball in the flames, because flaming balls are bad. Unfortunately, the “physics” — which is to say the way the game does not obey it — make stuffing your balls into the cup slightly less painful than trying to stretch your funbag over your forehead. While it’s covered it lard. And your hands are all soapy. And your forehead is thirty feet up. And you’re on fire. And a quadruplegic. And Welsh. Nevertheless, the lite version has 10 levels, but the $0.99 full version gives you 100 levels of ball-cupping, sack-stretching action! So why spend another day not catching a ball in a cup when you could still not be catching a ball in a cup?
App Name: Hyperspace Lite
Developer: Jirbo, Inc.
Category: Games
Ohhh, do I
have to? *sigh*
Fiiiine. Yes, it’s another cutesy Jirbo kids game. It presents with a grid of translucent tiles. Your damnable little Jirbo dude will flip out blue tiles. Your job is to flip the grid tiles where the blue one is going to land in order to eliminate it and any tiles above, below, or to either side of it. Periodically, powerups that contain line-clearing zappers or area-clearing bombs will appear. Once you eliminate all blue tiles on a level, you move on to the next. Okay, I’m going to come out and say that this one isn’t all that bad — it’s moderately decent, in fact, though I say that grudgingly. It’s fairly simple and does get repetative, but at least it isn’t the same sort of tired, derivative pap Jirbo typically spews forth, the graphics are decent, the sounds, while passable, get a bit tiresome and grating after enough play, and the gameplay is simple enough that the children it’s aimed at should have fun with it. The lite version has an odd 7 levels.
App Name: Jive Lite
Developer: Jirbo, Inc.
Category: Games
Okay, now you’re just being a douche. Jive is Bejeweled with Jirbo characters. Nuff said.
App Name: iBART
Developer: Pandav, Inc.
Category: Navigation
For you public transit commuters in the San Francisco Bay area, iBART is your portable, digital transit guide. It features an offline day planner, instructions, station info, arrival scheudles, a full multitouch-enabled BART map, and current service advisories. It’s even nicely presented, too. Now, who’s going to do one of these up for the
SLUT?
App Name: PocketHoops
Developer: Charles Cliffe
Category: Entertainment
It’s a good thing Charles categorized this under “Entertainment,” because I’d be hard pressed to call this a game. PocketHoops is, as the name suggests, a single-player freestyle hoop shooting app. The idea is to grab one of the basketballs on the court with your finger and flick it into the hoop. The Good: It uses OpenGL and makes effective use of 3D graphics. It additionally employs the Bullet Physics Engine, a free, open-source rigid body physics and collision detection API originally designed for the PS3, so the movement and reaction of the basketballs is satisfyingly realistic. Graphically, it’s about what you’d expect a narrow-walled basketball court to look like, except maybe for the blue brick walls. It’s not bad, but it’s nothing special. The bad: While the physics engine is robust, the touch routines are not. Picking up a ball is problematic, and when you try and hold on to it, it wiggles and shimmies and orbits your finger in a desperate, unconscious cry for Ritalin, and lots of it. It also responds to the accelerometer in all three dimensions. You’d think this is a good thing — and it’s fun to play with for a few minutes — but when you try to actually take a shot, you’ll immediately understand how it makes picking up balls difficult and sinking baskets the best best thing to impossible. Imagine trying to shoot some hoops on an active flight simulator unit. Taken as a toy, it’s moderately amusing. Just don’t try to become a finger flickin’ Michael Jordan.
CodeMind Software
Category: Utilities
A simple port of the Mac OS X utility designed for coders to convert ASCII characters to decimal, hex, octal, and binary. It’s quite plain and utilitarian, but it’s a programmer’s converter. What more do you want?
App Name: Coin Toss
Developer: Joshua Baran
Category: Entertainment
“My first attempt at an iPhone application,” sez Joshua. Josh, nothing personal, and this isn’t aimed specifically at you, but I wish developers would stop using the App Store as a dumping ground for their My First App efforts. For most developers worth a grain or two of salt, this is the sort of thing developers create experimentally and never actually release, and for good reason: It’s pointless, and it’s been done before. Repeatedly. And better. They’re learning exercises developers use to help familiarize themselves with the API by building practical, working examples within their current knowledge set, the experience from which they take with them to build more and more complex apps until they finally have something worth unleashing on the general public. (My own dev days were a little different; I just started in on a new language wth a big project and just learned as I went, but that’s just my personal method of operation.) There’s another reason good devs never release stuff like this: Your first app is your first impression, and first impressions are hard to shake when you eventually release the good stuff. Want to make a good first impression and get people talking? By all means write your coin tosses and flashlights and unit converters and looping video lighters and pictures of wood. That’s an accomplishment and you should be proud, never doubt that. Just don’t release them. Learn from them and write something better. Otherwise the impression you leave is that you’re just another hack drooling out streams of uselessness that will coat everything you release from then on with a salivary sheen of fail. You may not get the immediacy of recognition, but being recognized for something worth crowing about is a, far better thing, and will work in your reputation’s favour in the long run. End of rant/lecture. The Great and Miserable Git has spoken.
(formerly Domanier)
Developer: Muthu Arumugam
Category: Utilities
A brief little app whose sole purpose is to track a list of websites of your choosing and display their Google and Alexa page ranks. Good for webmasters who want to keep an eye on their standing on them thar interwebs.
App Name: DianHua Dictionary
Developer: JSQ, LLC
Category: Reference
A pretty robust Chinese-English dictionary for those who want to get their pinyin on. It uses the CC-CEDICT project for its results, and lets you search in English, Pinyin, traditional or simplified Chinese characters. It also sports a number conversion module so you can learn how the Chinese numbering system works. It’s presented quite simply with no frills, but it’s quite functional.
App Name: FltPlan.com FltDeck Airport/FBO Info Guide
Developer: FltPlan.com
Category: Travel
Well there’s a mouthful. FltDeck is an app for all the flyboys (and girls) out there. Take this app with you on your flights and let FltDeck query FltPlan.com for all the details you’ll ever need about your flight from takeoff to landing. Airport and city names, fuel availability, time zones, AOE data, frequencies for tower, ground and clearance delivery, ATIS and AWOS frequencies, FBO names, numbers and frequencies, longest runway length, approach and lighting information, airport and FBO location diagrams (where available), data on over 5,000 airports in the US, Canada, the Bahamas and Mexico, and a half ton more. Why bother lugging a connected laptop or netbook into the cockpit with you when all you need is right in your pocket?
App Name: iSee4K
Developer: Edward Watkins
Category: Productivity
From expensive planes to expensive pro video cameras, here’s an app for all you RED ONE camera owners out there to help you get the shot. (Presumably geared particularly for the RED ONE 4K) iSee4K is a calculator that will take your lens size, f stop, and distance from subject, then crunch numbers and spit out the DOF, angular/dimensional FOV, lens equivalences, storage requirements (RED only) and max frame rate/timebase settings (RED only).
App Name: iVisu
Developer: pearworks
Category: Productivity
Another connected home controller, this one designed for MMCore-based home automation systems. As usual, you can control various connected parts of your home remotely through this app. Can’t say much more about that, because the only thing my home is connected to is other homes.
App Name: Smokers
Developer: Muthu Arumugam
Category: Health & Fitness
A basic app that lets you enter the price of a pack of smokes, and then track just how much you spend on them on a daily basis, ostensibly in an attempt to make you realize how much money you’re wasting on cigarettes. Alternatively, it’s a basic app that lets you enter the price of a pack of smokes, and then track just how much you spend on them on a daily basis so you’ll know how much money you’ve got left to spend on beer.
App Name: Movies
Developer: Jeffry Grossman
Category: Entertainment
Now this …
this is cool. Anyone who likes going to the movies is gonna
love this thing. Movies is your one stop shop for anything to do with movies. Locate theatres near you through GPS. Bookmark favourite theatres. Get a map to their location and their phone number in case you need to call. Find out what movies are playing at them. See showtimes. Get details on the movies playing there, including run time, rating, release date, director, cast, and a brief synopsis. See Flixster ratings. Link to their IMDb listing. Watch the trailers. Buy tickets for specific showtimes online through Flixster. See what new movies are opening this week, next week, and for the next few months, get listings of top box office hits, find out when movies will be hitting DVD/Blu-Ray. And do it all from your iPhone. All you need to do for a night out at the movies then is show up at the designated theatre for the chosen movie at the specified time. You don’t even need to stand in line for tickets. It seems to work in Canada and the US at the very least, so if you have any kind of interest in movies, this thing kicks nine levels of hell out of anything that has gone before it. I’m going to have to move this one over into my “Must Have” column.
xTeo
Category: Entertainment
This, on the other hand … not so much. Trailers Lite is a lite version of a $3.99 app that is simply for viewing movie trailers. Just like Movies does. Only this lite version comes “pre-loaded” with 50 trailer descriptions and links to view them online, and will rotate them as new ones become available. It does feature higher resolution poster viewing and “poster flow” which, as you can probably guess, is coverflow for movie posters that link to their trailers. Nifty, I suppose, but it doesn’t really add a whole lot of practical value. The full version comes pre-loaded with 300 trailer descriptions, but frankly, four bucks for that just doesn’t wash. Unless you have a psychological need for eye candy and big poster images, stick with Movies.
App Name: Emergency Distress Beacon
Developer: Cinn Dev
Category: Navigation
A fancy name for an app that simply lets you E-Mail your current GPS coordinates to someone. Useful I suppose in case you get lost in the middle of the Mojave or the women’s clothing department of a Wal-Mart Supercenter, but frankly, if you’re in a situation where you need helicopter assistance to be located, chances are the rescue squad will have access to a mobile phone more readily than E-Mail.
App Name: A Free Level
Developer: MarketWall.com
Category: Utilities
Oh, jeez. MarketWall is back, and they’re compiling SDK demo code again. Oh, but this time they added a ruler. A
ruler, if you can believe such a thing. Like Ruler Plus, listed above, only ugly. Much like the level itself, which looks like what would happen if you trusted your carpentry work to MS Paint. Also, ali1996, who reviewed this app with 5 stars and the note, “I can’t explain how awesome this is. Definitely exact,” you’re either 12 as the date in your account name suggests and a moron besides, so easily amused that you giggle like a Japanese schoolgirl every time you closely examine the jaunty contours of your navel, or under the employ of MarketWall. Or all of the above. Whatever. All I know is that I can’t wait to see what MarketWall has in store next — I’m really looking forward to a solid release of Hello World.
App Name: ZoomIn
Developer: Martin Gordon
Category: Photography
ZoomIn is another online photo hosting site. Create a ZoomIn account if you don’t already have one, take pictures, and host them on ZoomIn with unlimited storage. You can also upload photos from your camera roll. It supports geotagging as well, and you can add brief descriptions to each photo.
App Name: The Tag Show
Developer: Dove Valley Apps
Category: Entertainment
Well this is … odd. You enter some keyword tags (or let it suggest a few random ones) and The Tag Show will go find and display random images from a variety of sources in a slideshow. You can save images you like to your photo album, E-Mail the links, or open the page the photos are found on in Safari. Unique, I suppose, and good if you want a slideshow screensaver or something, or just like surfing random pictures and hope you come across something interesting you can tuck away for later viewing.
App Name: iBrake
Developer: andreac
Category: Utilities
Well there’s a novel use for the accelerometer: A “brake efficiency tester.” Mount your device in the car, accelerate to some ungodly speed, then slam on the brakes and watch iBrake measure the efficiency of your car’s brakes. Probably not all that useful for the average user, and its accuracy is dependent upon the accuracy of the accelerometer, naturally, so I certainly wouldn’t advise that professionals put all of their faith in it either. If for no other reason than that this otherwise noncommittal review contains no snark, I would like to point out that pimping a URL to your site where a “better” description lives that for some reason couldn’t be written down in the App Store description, that can’t be copy and pasted, contains a mixed-case directory name, and is case sensitive, is not a good idea. Bad webmaster. Bad!
App Name: Haberci
Developer: Vayen
Category: News
A Turkish news aggregator. What, you want me to do a song and dance number, too? A little soft shoe? Beatnik poetry? That’s all I got, make do with it.
App Name: GPS Tracker
Developer: InstaMapper LLC
Category: Navigation
How to be a creepy stalker in three easy steps: 1) Download and install GPS Tracker on your victim’s iPhone. 2) Run it. 3) Track their movements with Google Maps in realtime. Yes, GPS Tracker lets you track the whereabouts of an iPhone that’s currently running GPS Tracker. With updates as often as every 5 seconds, you can pretty much see where that phone and its attendant wielder are going anytime. Of course, you need to register at Instamapper.com, because that’s where it will transmit its location data — the iPhone only has a GPS receiver, not a transmitter, after all, so all it can do is transmit its coordinates over a data connection. Also, because stuff like this can’t be run in the background, it must be running in the foreground for it to be able to transmit location data. Except for recording your movements for posterity, that kind of renders it largely useless, since you’ll probably be with the phone it’s running on while it’s transmitting its coordinates, and you probably have a pretty good idea of where you are at any given time. To track someone else they’d have to be consciously runninng the app, which means they don’t mind you tracking their every move — which is kind of creepy at both ends.
Ian Marsh
Category: Games
I don’t get it. I noticed that this game has had 49 reviews so far and an average rating of four and a half stars — but … it’s a Towers of Hanoi game. Move a stack of progressively larger discs from one side to the other without stacking larger on top of smaller. Been around since dirt was young. So what’s so damn appealing about this that it’s got a damn near perfect rating from so many people? After downloading it and playing it for myself … I’m still a bit mystified. Sure, it’s got nice depth-cued backgrounds that are pretty in their unfocused way and don’t distract from the game. Sure, the rest of the graphics are decent even if they do look like stacks of coins. But it’s not exactly notable for heaps of flash and pizazz — just some nice scenery. It has progressive levels with an increasing number of discs, as expected. But underneath it’s still Towers of Hanoi. Oh well. Despite the lack of a now-commonplace “lite” or “free” designation, Ian opted to go with the “It isn’t a demo, there’s just an enhanced version available” school of marketing by stumping for Hanoi Plus, which features more levels, more backgrounds, and move counting. But the Plus version is only a buck, so it’s not like he’s out to rob you blind, and if you’re truly devoted to Towers of Hanoi, you could do worse. If you’re not so hip to Towers of Hanoi, well … this one’s on the house.
Silver Mana Software
Category: Games
It’s yet another snake game. Yee. Frickin’. Haw. This one takes a poor swamp-faring anaconda and sticks him in the desert where he can die a horrible, parched death — much like I wish most snake games would. I’d let one or two live maybe, if they’re good. This one, with its bland graphics and sound that make me pine for the now-vintage Nokia 5110 version, would not be one of them.
App Name: Inspired’s Fit 2 Vote
Developer: Inspired Arts and Media, LLC
Category: Games
Heh heh heh. One for the Americans. Fit 2 Vote essentially presents you with a bunch of quotes, and your job is to determine if they were said by Obama or McCain. To choose your answer, lean your device left for Obama or right for McCain. Ha! Subtle political humour. I dig it. You need to get 50 correct answers to declare who you’re voting for. Are you a loony left-leaning Liberal or a ranting religious right-leaning Republican? Are you fit to vote? (Disclaimer: Not valid in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, the Ozarks region of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Topeka Kansas, or Utah.)
App Name: Jammy
Developer: Codesign
Category: Utilities
You jammy bastards should like this one: Jammy is a simple personal database construction set, after a fashion. Define forms and fields for user input via selection boxes and create databases that store data
your way. Want to catalog your DVDs, CDs, video games or other such collectibles but no app currently in existence does it quite the way you want? Make a database yourself in Jammy and create the fields
you want to store. Sure, it’s no-frills 20lb A4 bond style, with no support for image storage, fancy fonts, or ability to perform calculations or anything like that, but if you want a no-nonsense, simple personal database designer, this is it.
App Name: Smack-a-Toon Lite
Developer: iMakeApps
Category: Games
Winner of the Captain Obvious Award for Developer Names, iMakeApps have gone and made Whack-a-Mole. Acceptable cartoony graphics, a simplistic cartoony “bonk” sound when you whack one, and not a whole lot else. The “lite” version is limited to 15 seconds per round and the single mole theme. Overall, this one lands firmly in the middle of “meh” country, but kids would probably love it. The full version is available for $2.99.
App Name: Tetravex Lite
Developer: Futrell Software
Category: Games
Hey, I kinda like this one. It’s a sedate yet coloruful little puzzler. You are presented with a series of squares sectioned off into four triangles and placed in a scratch area. The triangular segments of each square are coloured. The object is to place each block in the play area such that the colour on each side of the block abuts an adjacent block with the same colour on its facing side — yellow to yellow, red to red, etc. No one side may sit against a block with a different colour facing it. In this manner you need to use logic to work out where each piece is supposed to go in order to figure out the placement of all blocks. The graphics are clean and effective and make sparse but nice use of special effects. The lite version here limits you to only the simple (2×2 squares) and easy (3×3 squares) levels. The full, uncrippled version is available for $2.99.
Y’know what? This one took me longer to compile than normal owing to life getting in my way, not to mention the whole Snapture deal. There are already more for me to add, but I’m going to cut this short and save them for the next edition, because it’s late, I still have one more article to do, and I’ve had just about as much fun as one man can take for one day. And by “fun” I mean “my shackles are chafing and I need some lotion.”
Moof.
Written by Eric March on August 29th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on App Store and Application Related and Free App Store Review and Gaming Related and Round Ups.
