New Free Apps for Monday, July 14th, 2008

by Eric March on July 14, 2008 at 11:54 pm

There’s no denying it. The App Store is huge. Yuuuuuuuge. The platform is already incredibly popular to develop for, there are big name developers alongside little ones, and there’s going to be a veritable cornucopia of cool stuff to check out — and some perhaps not so great. And it’s only been open for 4 days. I like to keep up-to-date on stuff like this — especially the free stuff because, hey. Free stuff. It’s low-maintenance and it doesn’t hammer at my wallet, begging to be fed. I like free. Free is good.

So I’m going to try and cover some of the latest free stuff to hit iTMS as a service to you, our dear readers. And my iPhone and Touch, because they get jealous when I pay too much attention to you.

Without further ado, I bring you all the latest software that money can’t buy, courtesy of your nearest iTunes. Screenshots are at the end, after the jump.

Tomatoes
Upon seeing the title, I was hoping that this was going to be a game that would let me throw rotting fruit at Steve Ballmer as he frenetically danced and danced. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, Tomatoes is a native reference app for movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. It lets you search RT’s vast library of films both mainstream and esoteric Cannes-wannabes. You can swipe through results, gather key information about the films, and open the full page in Mobile Safari. There’s really not much more to it than that; it’s quite basic and it does what it does, no more and no less.

Banner Free
Jailbreakers should remember this. It’s the App Store version of the LED Banner app by Akamatsu Masayuki that’s been floating around for months. There’s nothing changed or different here; it’s still the same banner app you’ve come to know and … be aware of. (No, really, it’s actually kinda nifty.)

Shape Writing Pad
Come over to the iPhone from the Palm did you? Or maybe you were a Windows Mobile user who preferred the character/word recognition tool over the virtual keyboard, yeah? Miss that good ol’ Graffiti handwriting system, do you? Keep missing it, because this isn’t what I expected. ShapeWriter is essentially an alternative to the built-in notepad app that looks remarkably like it, but without the smooth scrolling or rubberbanding, and with a special keyboard that works in kind of the opposite way to the built-in Apple one. Whereas the latter will let you slide your fingers along the keyboard until you get the key you want, and only then register a keypress when you lift your finger, Shape Writing Pad deliberately registers the keys you drag your fingers to, supposedly as a means to speed typing by allowing you to just “draw” your words. It works like this: Let’s say you wanted to write “sausage.” You simply mash on “s”, then drag your way through a, u, s, a, g, and land on e. A blue line will follow your path like some crazed stalker, and when you lift your finger — and assuming it understood your intent — your word will appear. Or at least a word that resembles something entirely unlike the word you were aiming at. Fortunately a list of suggested words appears in a panel just above the keyboard which you can pick your word from. You handle double letters by simply ignoring them and picking them out later from the list of suggestions. Capitals work a bit funny; after you spell your word, the CASE key will cycle the entire word through all lower-case, first letter up, or all upper-case. It is also capable of learning new words, and if you’re one o’ them erudite wordsmiths you’ll probably be doing a lot of training — assuming you find this app to your liking. It comes with an alternate keyboard called Atomik, accessible through the MENU key, which is a completely different and rather strange layout that I can only assume was designed to piss John Dvorak off. Or maybe one is more proficient with it when stoned. I don’t know. Overall Shape Writing Pad is an interesting concept, and with practise it might even be better than the virtual keyboard. I’m just not particularly inclined to prove that out.

Shakespeare
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. Shakespeare is a native app project that aims to give you the collected works of William Shakespeare in the palm of your hand, thanks to the collaborative team efforts of Readdle and PlayShakespeare.com. Whether you fancy the internal struggle of poor conflicted Hamlet, the pastoral comedy of As You Like It, or the tragic romance of Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare (the app) will give you all the Shakespeare (the playwright) you can shake a wild shrew at.

pearMe
Excuse me? A bit presumptuous, aren’t you? How do you know I even have any pears? I have a good mind to– ah … wait, what? Oh. Right. Pearworks’ pearMe is a concentration-style memory game where the object is to pair pear match identical images until every tile has found its twin. So what’s the M. Night Shaymalan-esque twist here? You can use the photos from your own camera roll or picture library as the tiles. Don’t have any? Not to worry, it comes with its own default set. You are scored based on the amount of time it took and the number of failed matches. Well, I say scored, but there isn’t actually any score to speak of; you just get a report the time elapsed and how many tries you took. It’s a decent little time waster, and you can’t beat free.

Lunar Calendar
Lunar Calendar gives you a … uh … calendar. A lunar calendar. In chinese. I can’t read chinese. Would you like a pear?

Fahr-info Berlin
This is a German ap. I can’t read German, either. Mostly. It says it’s available in English, but the description is in German. That’s okay though because I think it’s a bus and train schedule for public transit in Berlin, which is something I have utterly no use for, but I’m sure someone in Berlin might. But what do I know? Ich bein ein domnkopf.

BMI
BMI It’s a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator for those of you trying to lose some weight — or trying to keep from gaining it. If that doesn’t sell it for you, then what if I told you your BMI was represented on the screen by a giraffe? A basketball-playing giraffe? I bet he makes a hell of a power forward.

aSubnet
A very simple app whose sole purpose is to calculate your IPv4 subnet masks. If you have no idea what that means, you don’t need it. For those of you whose geek-o-meters just pinged, it lets you calculate your mask with just a swipe of the finger, and lets you scroll through all 32 possible masks in real time in either decimal or hex notation. You can even E-Mail the results to yourself.

Dice Bag
Dude. Your cat just ran off with my d20. My favourite d20. The one Gary Gygax himself once rolled and saved versus death when he was battling a ninth-circle demon. How the hell am I supposed to roll a saving throw without a d20? Oh, wait! Hey, I got one on my iPhone. Okay, enough geeking out. Dice Bag is an extremely simple dice rolling app that feature all your standard polyhedral role playing dice from d4 straight up to d20. (Sorry, no d100; the cat has a thing for hectagons.) To make things easier you can also throw common dice combos — 2d4, 3d6, 4d6 with the lowest dropped, percentiles, etc. Visuals are straight up elementary, so don’t expect the 3D dice rolling action of MotionX Poker. This is strictly utilitarian in presentation.

WeDict
Here’s another one jailbreakers will be familiar with: WeDict, a digital dictionary with over 140,000 words. Of course, you can’t download any extra dictionaries to this like you could with the jailboken version — not yet anyway. I hope we see some nice supplimentary dictionary releases for this soon. Anyway, it’s the WeDict you all know and love — simple, effective interface, easy searching, etc. A must for anyone who needs to brush up on their loquatiousness. (That would seem to include most forum posters these days…)

Flashlight
Yes. It’s a flashlight. That is all. Oh! It has a strobe mode, too, just in case you’re expected to throw a surprise rave at a moment’s notice. If you need a screenshot, open a blank page in your browser. It’s in there. Trust me.

Okay, I think that about wraps it up. Fire up iTunes if you see anything that tickles your fancy, and check out the gallery below. Me, I’m going to go fling rotten fruit at a picture of Steve Ballmer taped to my cat.

[Show as slideshow]

Posted in Application Related, Gaming Related, Round Ups, app store