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.My Secret Hideout [iPad]
This is not a game, the blurb says, but an interactive toy. Or poem. Or artwork. So, while this app appears to be suffering from an identity crisis, that maybe isn’t such a bad thing for an experimental “interactive textual art generator set in a treehouse”. It doesn’t have goals and you can’t win anything to satiate your need for achievement, but you can play around with seemingly endless combinations by dragging leaves and attaching them to the tree, which makes the tree grow as you explore it’s manifold variations. So basically, we’re all winners in this game.
PostSecret [iPhone, iPod touch and iPad]PostSecret is an art project that allows anyone to send in a secret on the back of a homemade postcard. These secrets and images are then collated onto a website (so far they have over half a million) where anyone can read them (the sender, of course, remains anonymous). So if you want to get something off your chest but can’t tell the people you know, here’s your outlet. It’s less raunchy thanTexts From Last Nightand not quite as hilarious asFML, but like those sites it makes for fascinating, sometimes daft, but always addictive reading. You think you’ll just read one, but you can’t stop. And now they’ve released their official app for some satisfying soul baring on the go.Hologram Live Wallpaper [Android]The question of phone wallpaper designs tends to matter less the older you get—that is, assuming it ever mattered at all. You might put your sweetheart on there, or your cat or niece or something cute like that. But you know, when you think about it, why should they get all the glory when you could instead have an animated 3D hologram? Well, the illusion of one anyway—which is what this app’ll give you. So get rid of all that sentimental rubbish and put this on there instead. Includes a whole bunch of options you can change like textures and color, shape and size, and depth of field. But, sadly, no Princess Leia.
Called Collaborative Poetry, this could just as easily be a mobile version of the surrealist game exquisite corpse, where a collaborative drawing or poem is created with successive contributors unaware of what’s been written or drawn previously. So you could use it for that or use it as they state, for festivals and public events, where it enables users to create new poems, and add new lines to already existing ones, using geolocation to determine if the user is in attendance at the event.
This is not a game, the blurb says, but an interactive toy. Or poem. Or artwork. So, while this app appears to be suffering from an identity crisis, that maybe isn’t such a bad thing for an experimental “interactive textual art generator set in a treehouse”. It doesn’t have goals and you can’t win anything to satiate your need for achievement, but you can play around with seemingly endless combinations by dragging leaves and attaching them to the tree, which makes the tree grow as you explore it’s manifold variations. So basically, we’re all winners in this game.
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Machinarium [iPad]The award-winning indie game fromAmanita Designgets a portable version for the iPad 2. So you can now get lost in the stunning graphics of this way-above-standard point-and-click adventure set in a city populated by robots and machines, solving puzzles as you go and getting charmed all over again by this indie classic. And with it being portable, it means you get an excuse to act all weird in public just like the guy in this video.Collaborative Poetry [Android]
Called Collaborative Poetry, this could just as easily be a mobile version of the surrealist game exquisite corpse, where a collaborative drawing or poem is created with successive contributors unaware of what’s been written or drawn previously. So you could use it for that or use it as they state, for festivals and public events, where it enables users to create new poems, and add new lines to already existing ones, using geolocation to determine if the user is in attendance at the event.