The app stores are teeming with new releases, but who has time to go through them all? We do. Bringing you a selection of the most interesting, creative, and innovative apps each week. Submit your suggestions for next week in the comments below.Mixel [iPad]Digital collage creation comes to the iPad in this art app from former design director of theNew York TimesKhoi Vinhand dump.fm’sScott Ostler. The app lets you collate images from the web, your image library, or Mixel’s library and mix them up to create a work and share them with friends, who can in turn interpret your piece or add to it to make a collaborative collage. The main idea is for it to be fun and playful, tapping into that child-like creativity that we all lose sight of—keeping the act of creation casual and adventurous.
The iPad is getting all the great apps this week. Trey Ratcliff, of Stuck In Customs fame, takes stunning HDR photos from beautiful places around the world and gives us a beautifully designed, visually-driven travel app. It lets you explore the most picturesque places on earth via photographs from people who’ve been there—all the photos are geotagged and allow you to discover places you might want to visit abroad or in your own city using the zoomable map. And for photographers it’ll throw up areas where they can take great photos in the places they might be visiting that might’ve gone unnoticed—all of which can be saved and accessed offline for when you’re on the road.
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SpellTower [iPad]Zach Gage, creator of furious bullet-dodging pixel-festBit Pilot, has turned his game development skills to the word game. In a frantic 13 days he came up with this ingenious puzzler, which involves players finding and swiping words on a 10×15 tile grid playable in four different challenge modes: Tower Mode, Puzzle Mode, Extreme Puzzle Mode, Rush Mode. Just like a crossword, you have to find words in the grids of letters, but the twist is you can join letters together in any direction you like. It also adds an element ofTetris-style play as unused letter blocks fall down so they can be used later.Poly™[iPad]Turn plain old drawings or photos into polygonal patterns of colours, breaking down an image into its essential components—not unlikeQuayolaand his geometric interpretations of classic paintings and architecture. Except, you’ll be doing it with far more meaningful compositions (your own) creating abstract works out of pictures of your cat. The app’s creator,Jean Christophe Naour, was inspired byDelaunay triangulation, invented by the mathematician Boris Delaunay in 1934.Flypost [iPhone, iPod touch and iPad]When it comes to sharing things—experiences, photos, artistic creations—smartphone apps come into their own. Taking its name from the guerilla marketing tactic of sticking flyers up everywhere, this app is billed as a mobile version of that postering technique but results in far less of an eyesore. It lets you share, look for, and recommend events going on in your local area in real-time, and companies can showcase their events, too. It’s not just limited to one type of event either but covers all sorts of entertainment—from galleries to gigs—all geolocated for your convenience. And if you still can’t find anything to do, it also displays a live news feed of your Twitter and Facebook friends, so you can just copy them, should you wish.Stuck On Earth [iPad]
The iPad is getting all the great apps this week. Trey Ratcliff, of Stuck In Customs fame, takes stunning HDR photos from beautiful places around the world and gives us a beautifully designed, visually-driven travel app. It lets you explore the most picturesque places on earth via photographs from people who’ve been there—all the photos are geotagged and allow you to discover places you might want to visit abroad or in your own city using the zoomable map. And for photographers it’ll throw up areas where they can take great photos in the places they might be visiting that might’ve gone unnoticed—all of which can be saved and accessed offline for when you’re on the road.