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Games

Byte The App: Must See Apps Of The Week 4/21

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.

One Single Life [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
As it says in the title, in this game you get one single life with which you have to simply jump between buildings while done out in your shirt and tie, like the guy’s some kind of escaped office worker who’s stepped out on a parkour rampage across the city’s building tops and has an incredible, flea-like leap. Anyway, the minute you die it’s game over. No more. Done. So unlike most games you get no more chances to continue, instead you get one anxious go and if you fail, you have to delete the app and re-download it or never play it again, which makes for an interesting concept but annoying gameplay.

Barcodas [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
Barcodes are pretty mundane things—black and white coded lines that recognize a product, a functional symbol of our consumerist society. But this app lets you scan those codes (ean(8/13) or upc(e/a)) and instead of telling you the price it turns the sequence into a musical pattern, allowing you to change the harmonic scale. Now the weekly supermarket visit can be a time of music making as you dance around the store to the tune of canned tuna.

Space InvadAR [Android]
One of the great things about augmented reality is, if there are no aliens to shoot in the real world—which there generally aren’t, to our great relief—you can still feel that sense of release that only comes from destroying at alien hordes via virtual reality. This game lets you do that by lining up your phone with a picture of planet earth and then start blasting away the attacking ships. Plus, they’ve made a great pun on invader and AR.

Trimensional [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
We featured this app a while back but this update is worth mentioning because not only does it allow you to send a gif or video of your rotating 3D scanned head, but (and this is the biggy) it also allows you to 3D print the scan of your face. You can export any scan from your iPhone as an OBJ, STL, or PLY file and email it to yourself and print straight from the email. Incredible, going from your smartphone to a physical cast of your face in a matter of minutes (OK, half hour). Of course, you’ll need a 3D printer, or you could always use an online printing service like Shapeways, then have the resulting object hang over the entrance to your house, like a sentry or gargoyle.

kijjaa! [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
This is a fairly simple 8-bit shoot ‘em up game but uses the iPhone as a controller, which elevates it above other simple 8-bit shooters. Your device becomes a gamepad while you play the game on a computer screen. You connect to your computer via the internet, enter a code, then get to control the ship using the iPhone’s accelerometer and gyroscope, moving it up and down to direct your fire at oncoming enemies.