Byte The App: Must See Apps Of The Week 5/19

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.

Hipster City Cycle [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
Meet Binky McKee, a hipster cyclist with dreams of doing nothing more than riding his fixie around the streets of a lovingly recreated hand-drawn 8-bit version of Philadelphia. It is your mission to help him achieve this goal, racing other bikers, earning bonus points for trackstanding, and scooping up junk food for energy boosts. As you glide past the great uncools you can tap them, making the girls swoon at your hipster power, the guys beam, and the occasional profanity fly forth from some total square. Binky’s pretentious cry of “Nietzsche” as he starts his race gives him some existential cred (Heidegger would’ve been a more esoteric choice), and you can muster followers that can come party daddy’s money away—all done, of course, in a lo-fi retro pixel style set to chiptune music by Patrick Todd and Joey Mariano of Cheap Dinosaurs. You’ll want to get caught playing this on the subway, with a copy of Being and Time poking out your satchel.

WURM [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
The iDevices are great for generative art apps and this is another one to add to the list. It’s a drawing tool that uses the touchscreen so you can create a myriad of swirling patterns, changing different parameters to fine-tune your algorithmic creation, constructing snake-like forms of varying levels of intensity. It also has a shuffle function for the laziest amongst us so you can just get down to the business of entwining colorful shapes, which you can then impress friends with by using as your wallpaper.

[via CreativeApplications]

Relict Racer [Android]
If you owned a gaming system back in the 1990s, then you’re probably familiar with the Micro Machines series of racing games, where you raced the little toy cars around household environments—like dining room tables, bedrooms, and games rooms—avoiding obstacles like oranges and rolling pins in a “Honey I Shrunk the Dodge Viper” type scenario. This is an update of that, using the application of AR so you can race over actual desks and kitchen surfaces. It has a multiplayer bluetooth option too, so you can play with friends who are of equal arrested development.

Haeckel Clock [iPad]
Clocks, don’t often get the arty treatment when it comes to apps, mostly because they’re seen as functional rather than decorative or playful. Well, no more. Built using openFrameworks and taking its cue from artist, naturalist and all-around polymath Ernst Haeckel, this uses radiolarian—water-dwelling single-cell life forms—which Haeckel often drew and studied as units of time. As time ebbs away, they rearrange themselves into more complex structures. It sure does look complicated for a clock, so here’s some more info on how these swirling circles actually tell the time. Still, the app looks great, it’s interactive, and it’s freeing the clock face from the duality of a digital or analogue aesthetic, laying down a third option: generative.

NYPL Biblion: World’s Fair [iPad]
Sounding like Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, this app lets you peer into… the world of tomorrow! As seen from the world of yesteryear, specifically from the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair, the app features footage, documents, radio interviews, and essays taken from the stacks of the New York Public Library’s huge archive. So take a history lesson and see what kind of future was being imagined when the world had just gone to war and the US was coming out of the Great Depression. Explore what kind of utopias they envisioned and the fashions that all the hep cats were wearing, along with the art that was enthralling the minds of the time.