Byte The App: Must See Apps Of The Week 3/10

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.

Situationist [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
If life has gotten too staid and predictable and it feels like you’re looking at the world through gray-tinted spectacles, this Marxist app from artists Benrik should help you shake things up. The name comes from Situationist International, avant-garde revolutionaries from the ’50s who advocated random experiences. Working a bit like a prank gameshow where all the participating parties are in on the prank, the app alerts you to other users in the vicinity and gets you to interact with them in some way—from paying them compliments to asking for their autographs to storming a TV station and instigating revolution. You upload a photo when you join so people can recognize you, then you choose what you want to happen to you. And then you wait…

50 Greatest Photographs of National Geographic [iPad]
This app’s not going to win any points for shortest name, but it might win points for services to amateur photographers. The National Geographic is home to some fantastic images of the planet and the people and cultures that populate it, such as the famous cover of the Afghan Girl with those piercing, haunting green eyes. Now that iconic image, along with 49 others, is featured in this app, all geo-tagged and featuring back stories and videos from the photographers about how each photo was shot—some of these images required a year’s worth of preparation!—along with alternate shots showing how they arrived at the final one, making for an illuminating history. But, annoyingly, the app has adverts even though it is a paid app.

N64oid [Android]
Slowly working their way up the different consoles of our collective youths, yongzh, the developer behind emulators for the NES, SNES, Gameboy, and Sega Genesis has now released this N64 version. You can now play those games of yore on the move, replaying a part of gaming history when cartridges were still cutting edge. Or at least, still considered acceptable. At the moment, only a few games are running smoothly, but hang in there and you’ll be relishing the nostalgic kicks of Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and the hallowed GoldenEye 007. Just imagine the processing power of the smartphones of the future that’ll have to emulate Mass Effect 2 and its ilk.

Random Word Machine [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
We all like to make up words, sometimes they become part of the global vernacular, like “meh”, and sometimes they remain just an inside joke among friends. Whatever the reason, making up words embiggens us all. But inventing new words can be tiring and time consuming. You might have better things to do like invent new numbers or something. So let this app invent those neologisms for you. It’s created by Dutch design studio Booreiland and based, they say, on neurolinguistic theories, thereby making the words effectively more probable. Generate some fanmazing words, then drop them into conversation as randomly as they were produced. Simple fun.

Chandroid [Android]
Should you be a frequenter of internet image boards—whether your motivation is to nurture the genesis of a meme, to wage some online war against kitten haters, troll people, make with the lolz, or meet with fellow Anonymous members to rally against corporations—you’ll inevitably have to have some downtime when you leave your computer and travel to work or go to the shop for more snacks. Well, not anymore. This app lets you browse and post to image boards while on the move. As they say on their Android Market page “Epic lulz on the go!”.