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Games

Byte The App: Must See Apps Of The Week 5/26

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.

Decim8 [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
Here’s to some welcome anarchy ripping through your iPhone photo library. Instead of helping you refine your images or spruce them up with some “retro summer of ’69 chic” photo filter, this app celebrates the joy of error. It seeks and destroys your photos by algorithmically grinding up your images using data-mashing filters. The result could be good or bad and the randomness it all is part of the appeal. There’s also a Flickr group pool should you want to share your pixel mutilations. Happy glitching!

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i3D [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
More than anything, this app is just plain fun in a geeky look-what-this-can-do kind of way. For best results they recommend using an iPad 2, but we don’t all own a forest of money trees, so try it out on your iPhone instead. It’s a free monocular 3D display that uses the front facing camera to track your head and change the display accordingly. It doesn’t work brilliantly on the iPhone (the video below is a bit deceiving), but it’s a work in progress and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s applied interactively.

Magic Piano [iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad]
This is worth it for the trailer below alone—that guy looks like he’s so happy skipping along playing his virtual app piano. You too could be that man. This is the free iPhone version of the popular iPad app ,Magic Piano HD, where you play different tracks using the Guitar Hero style of play—hitting the highlighted key at the appropriate time using the touchscreen interface. But while the app is free and you get a few songs to play, if you want more you’ll have to purchase them using the in-game currency of Smoola.

AndCam3D – 3D Camera [Android]
If you want to make like Sebastian Denz and create 3D pictures on the fly, then maybe this app can help you out. It snaps 3D images in a couple of different ways: as wigglegrams (below), those palpitation-inducing wobbly two-frame animations that create an illusion of depth without the need for glasses, and saves them as a gif file; stereograms, where you get two images side-by-side taken at a slightly different angle and cross your eyes to get the depth effect; and anaglyph images, the classic red-green stereoscopic pictures that you view with the red-blue glasses.

SoundHound [Android, iPhone, iPod touch and iPad]
This works along the same principles as the ever-popular music recognition tool Shazam, which can identify the name and artist of just about any song blaring from the speakers of your local bar, club or cafe. SoundHound claims it can do this in 4 seconds. But amazingly, and this is why it’s worth mentioning, you can also hum, speak, or sing the song and it’ll look for it using your dulcet tones. And for those times when you can just remember a snippet of a lyric, you can type the words you remember and search that way.