The Week In iPhone Apps: Spiders, Robots, and OCD
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This week in your facelifted, more searchable, iTunes-sortable app roundup: Flickr goes official; Navigon grows more sociable; spiders poop web; your homescreen gets organized; rhythm games find a new muse; and robots master the art of pillow talk.
Tick Talk Robot: In the mornings of the future, humanoid, quasi-British, deep-voiced robots will lull you with a reading of the day’s news, stroke your hair, and breathe fragrant, bacon-scented air across your cheek until you wake. Until then, there’s Tick Talk Robot, which does pretty much the same thing, except without all the roboculinary eroticism. Two dollars.
AppButler: This isn’t quite as cool as the press materials make it out to be, but it’s still not a bad idea, considering how much easier it is to arrange apps with iTunes 9. As it stands now—as a web app—AppButler gives you a bunch of free icons to place on your springboard as dead links, which act as labels (News, Productivity, Music, whatever) for your apps, so you can make interesting homescreen layouts. A native version—whatever that would look like—is mired in the approval process as we speak.
Riddim Ribbon: A new concept rhythm game showed off at Apple’s iPod event this week, Riddim Ribbon shoots your avatar/ball/blob/thing down a pathway, on which you have to hit lots and lots of targets. The more you hit, the more the song builds; the fewer, the sparser the instrumentation gets. This one comes out in October, unfortunately.
Fantasy Sports Stats Grabber: Aggregates cross-league stats in a Fantasy-league-friendly way, so you can keep closer track of how much money you’ve lost to your coworkers in this bizarre ritual of manhood that I’ll never, ever understand. A buck.
Flickr: Better late than never, Yahoo. At least the app is good at what it does, which includes uploading and geotagging photos, and managing your account. Warning: It can be sluggish, especially when loading thumbs. That’s nothing to get too worked up about though, seeing as this one’s a freebie.
Navigon: Navigon was only a killer feature or two away from a clear victory in our iPhone nav app Battlemodo, and with the latest free update, it may have gotten one. Or two! Now it features a full, proper-noun-reading text-to-speech engine for giving you vocal directions, as well as inbuilt music controls, which replace the iPhone’s limited default popup panel. Obvious, maybe, but still awesome.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor: You play a spider with an extremely overactive web gland, and hop around a bunch of levels, trapping bugs and solving mysteries. The demo video at the app’s website makes a better case for playing this lovely little game than I can, but I will say this: Spider game, I love you. Three dollars.
This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!
