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Games

Byte The App: Must See Apps Of The Week 8/4

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.

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.

Sonaur [Android]
Billed as an “ambient toy,” this app a generative audiovisual tool that uses three different elements to allow you to create sounds using the touchscreen. Firstly there’s the blue “jellyfish,” which can be pushed and pulled around to make a sonar-like sound. Next is a swarm of “flies,” which interact with the “jellyfish” as they bounce around the screen. Finally, there’s three hanging “plants” that pan the audio when you tilt the phone and can be pollinated by the “flies.” The use of natural entities to describe the interactive components isn’t just to be cute but is part of an overarching concept outlined by creator Miles Peyton to create an experience that rests “somewhere between an ecosystem and a musical instrument.”

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iFightback [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
As you open up this app and the blood starts pumping, you’ll be forgiven for hearing the opening chords to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” while a training montage of you clambering up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and punching the air plays out in your mind. This self defense training app gives you a selection of scenarios and then shows you the wrong and right way to deal with them. It then instructs you in the violent art of the Self Defense Training System, which “uses only the most lethal and combat-effective tactics from all known martial arts while eliminating all of the sporting and ceremonial techniques normally associated with martial arts and combat sports.” Nice.

Boskoi [Android]
An open source food-foraging app that maps out edible products in your local area. So if you’re fed up with the lunchtime lines and fancy foraging for some wild natural produce, this allows users to upload places where food can be found in urban areas, classifying it under different categories like nuts, fruit, seafood, herbs, fungi, etc, with text explaining where it’s located—other users can then edit and amend the information. It’s a fantastic and innovative idea that makes great use of geo-location and crowd-sourcing to update and refine the collective database. You can find out more about it from their website.

Groove Coaster [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
Here’s a visually inviting new game from the award-winning Reisuke Ishida, creator of Space Invaders Infinity Gene. This one’s a rhythm game where you hit the touchscreen when prompted, keeping in time with the music, as the dove-like avatar glides about in a spaces-cape of exploding colors and geometric forms. It only requires one finger, but it’ll take your full concentration, and be careful your eyeballs don’t dry up as its frantic action and dizzying visuals may cause you to forget to blink.

Layar Vision [iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Android]
AR browser Layar has finally caught up with its competitor Junaio and is now offering real world object interaction, along with its location-based augmented reality. So you can hold your device up to a real world object, like a newspaper or magazine, and it searches its database, once it recognizes it, it’ll then give you a digital overlay of how you can interact with it.