Apps Rush: Be a Ninja Turtle or a Fish Out of Water

Twitter #music

After lots of speculation this month, Twitter has finally launched its standalone music discovery app. It serves up charts of songs that are currently trending on Twitter as well as those being tweeted by the people you follow offering iTunes preview clips for most users, but full songs for paying Spotify and Rdio subscribers.iPhone

Yahoo! Weather

iPhone owners already have a preloaded weather app using data from Yahoo, but this standalone app is a big step on in its production quality and features. The app provides forecasts, heat and wind maps and sunrise/sunset times among other features, with the twist that this data is accompanied by full-screen photos from that location, pulled from Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service.iPhone

GuardianWitness

Obvious disclosure: this is an app from the Apps Blog’s parent company Guardian News Media. Described as “the home of user-generated content on the Guardian”, the app helps readers contribute to live news stories, suggest other stories and features, and enter competitions. Submissions can include text, photos and/or videos.iPhone

YoWindow

One more weather app this week (hopefully) just in time for spring to finally get underway. The schtick here is that the app shows you a “living landscape” representing the weather in your chosen location, which you can swipe through to see how it’s forecast to change.iPhone

Touchfit: GSP

Zolmo made its name with millions of downloads of its Jamie Oliver cooking apps. Now it’s striking out into fitness, teaming up with mixed martial-arts fighter Georges St-Pierre. The app offers video workout exercises from Georges himself, and promises to adapt its routines based on your progress.iPhone

Fish Out of Water!

I was up until midnight playing this, after having downloaded it for a quick play around 11pm. That’s a guide to the addictive qualities of this latest game from Halfbrick Studios the developer behind Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. You skim colourful fish across the ocean, get rated by crabs, and unlock gems to build power-ups. Sounds strange, plays marvellously.iPhone / iPad

Yahoo! Mail

The Yahoo! Mail app isn’t new for smartphones, but the company has released a new version that’s optimised for tablets. It works with the Yahoo! Mail service, with support for multiple accounts, photo attachments and notifications for new messages.iPad

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run

Cowabunga! Booyakasha! Eat My Shorts, Man! Oh wait, that’s the other one. Yes, it’s not just The Simpsons that’s lasted as a TV brand: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been cavorting on TV screens recently like it’s 1989, and now there’s an official iOS game. Released by Nickelodeon, it’s a “combat runner” game set on the rooftops of New York. In-app purchases of up to 34.99 pay for additional virtual coins somewhat surprising, given the young fanbase and the initial 1.49 download.iPhone / iPad

Bookworm Heroes

Here’s a fully-freemium game from EA’s PopCap division the home of Bejeweled and Plants Vs. Zombies. This is actually a new version of word-game Bookworm, reconfigured for the free-to-play market. You build words from letter tiles against Facebook friends, while earning or buying virtual coins to boost your prospects.iPhone / iPad

Osom Market

Swedish startup Osom is pitching its new app as “Instagram meets Craigslist”: an app for buying and selling clothes, shoes and other items, with filtered photos and hashtags helping show off the items and make them findable. Vintage stores are expected to be among its sellers.iPhone

Calendo Event Discovery

Calendo styles itself as a “smart recommendation engine” for events, based on your Facebook friends, location and existing tastes. The app wants users top open it regularly to see what events are coming up, with notifications for notable ones, and sharing features.iPhone

The Thirty-Nine Steps

Book publisher Faber and digital studio The Story Mechanics are giving John Buchan’s famous novel an interactive twist for iPad. It puts you in the position of central character Richard Hannay, exploring scenes, collecting items and experiencing the story in a form somewhere between a book and a game.iPad

Cut the Rope: Time Travel

Cutesy monster Om Nom has returned with a third Cut the Rope game for Android, with a time-travelling theme as he tries to feed sweets to his ancestors. The action is very similar to the previous games: you’re cutting ropes to solve physics-puzzles across six locations, although this time there are two on-screen monsters to feed, not one. The link above is for iPhone, but here’s the iPad version.iPhone / iPad

Guardian News and Media 2013