Tag / App of the Week

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

iOS AOTW: Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint

2012’s first iOS app of the week is Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint.

This game is incredibly addictive. Based on the game of billiards, this game is pretty simple. You use your finger as a cue to connect discs of the same colour while creating shapes out of them and scoring bonus points from combos. 20 standard levels come with the game and the rest, along with 3 arcade modes and more to come in future updates, can be purchased with a ‘Skeleton Key’ at £2.49, which the developers say will soon increase in price due to the sheer amount of content that they have planned. Watch the first trailer below and hit the link to get the app if you have nothing planned for the next week as you try to get an ‘S’ in every level.

Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint, iOS, £0.69

Download here or visit the website

by Henry Hunt

WP7 AOTW: Ask Ziggy

The first WP7 AOTW of 2012 is Ask Ziggy by Averotek.

This app is (to quote the description on the Marketplace) ‘your personal assistant that goes beyond Siri functionality’. It is basically Windows Phone’s answer to Apple’s Siri.

To use this app all you need to do is ask it a question and it will give you an answer, rather like Siri. This app however goes into a great deal more detail than its iOS counterpart. An example of this is when I asked Ziggy how old the American President Barack Obama was. The reply was this:

“Barack Obama was born on August 4th, 1961 and therefore he is fifty years old. He is the 44th President of the United States. He is the first African American to be appointed to office.”

As you can see, Ziggy goes into a great amount of detail which cannot always be said for Siri.

If you have a Windows Phone and want to talk to your phone like those iPhone guys do, Ask Ziggy is the app for you.

Ask Ziggy, Windows Phone, Free

Download on the Marketplace or visit the website

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

App of the week: Flipboard

This week’s app of the week is Flipboard.

Flipboard is a fantastic app that lets you add whatever content you desire to a virtual ‘social magazine’. Complete with Facebook and Twitter integration, it is more than a conventional RSS reader as it corroborates your social feeds and go-to websites in one place with a beautiful flipping interface. A free account will sync your feeds across devices, and a recent update allowed the app to work on iPhone and iPod touch. Take a look at what Flipboard themselves have to say about it in the video below.

Flipboard is now my only source for news and social updates. The app is free and gloriously ad-free and I would recommend it to anyone with an iDevice. Even Apple love it, having made it their iPad app of the year. It might also be in the running for a more prestigious award from a certain website this weekend…

Flipboard, iOS, Free
Download from the App Store or visit the website

by Henry Hunt

WP7 AOTW: Face Swap

This weeks WP7 AOTW is Face Swap by Microsoft Research.

This app, to put it simply, swaps two people’s faces. There is no practical purpose to this app as it is just to waste time. To use this app, you simply select a photo in your photo albums and the app automatically finds the faces in the image. You then proceed to select which faces to swap and the app does all the rest. You can then proceed to laugh at the results.

Simples.

Face Swap, Windows Phone 7, Free

Download from the Marketplace

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

iOS AOTW: iTunes 12 Days of Christmas

This week’s iOS AOTW is a simple one – Apple’s own 12 Days of Christmas app.

It is the most wonderful time of the year and therefore Apple’s annual European promotion to give away a new free thing every day from December 26th to January 6th has returned. Grab the app now to get notifications of each gift, with something sure to take your fancy. Last year we got Mirror’s Edge, a Charlie Chaplin film and the amazing Father Ted Christmas special to go with the Kings of Leon and Kylie Minogue, so the good must surely balance out the bad this year as well. Although not all the gifts may be to your tastes, remember Apple don’t have to do this and something good will surely pop up.

Merry Christmas from all at Digixav

iTunes 12 Days of Christmas, iOS, Free

Download from the App Store

by Henry Hunt

WP7 AOTW: YouTube Download

This week’s  Windows Phone app of the week is YouTube Download.

This app is like Ronseal. It does exactly what it says on the tin. It allows you to download HD videos on to your phone from YouTube. To download a video all you need to do is to search for the video in question and press download. It then gets added to your download queue. You can even choose what quality the video downloads in. One of the best things about this app is that the videos you have downloaded are then available in the music and video hub along with all your other audiovisual content to ensure that all your media remains centralised as Microsoft intended.

YouTube Download, Windows Phone 7, 79p

Download from the Marketplace

by Henry Hunt

WP7 AOTW: Torchbear

From now on I will be doing (roughly once a week) a post on a good Windows Phone 7 app and what I think about it. For the first post I am going to do a free app called Torchbear.

Torchbear is a ‘social game’ in which the users create a torch which can be passed on from player to player via their phone’s location services. A torch can be passed on to any player within 1.6 km and each player can only carry one torch at a time. Each torch must be given a description of what it is for. The first torch that I created contained a link to this blog but others are created to spread a message, promote a cause or for people to post pictures on the torch on a specific subject.

The only problem that I have with Torchbear is that there are not enough users for passing on a torch to be easy. In order for me to pass one on I have to travel 9 km into Brighton.

Torchbear is a fun app that, if you have a Windows Phone, I recommend you download.

Torchbear, Windows Phone 7, Free

Download on the Marketplace or visit the website