Welcome to the weekend, friends. By now most of us have fallen back in our routines at school or at work, but are you being as productive as you can be? Are you being as creative as you can be? Are you being as ‘piggy’ as you can be? This week’s featured apps are a little of this, a little of that but a little something for everyone.
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The iPhone: My Minutes
We all set goals, some at work and others in our personal lives. But sometimes our goals can be overwhelming. My Minutes is a way to track the time you spend on certain projects or activities, allowing you to increase productivity and monitor your progress.
Whether you want to put more time into a project or limit your time on other activities (cough — Facebook — ahem), Lost City Studios is giving you the opportunity to do so free of charge. They hit you with some inspiring quotes to keep you engaged. You’ll get daily notifications with the goals you need to hit today. It doesn’t matter when or in what order you do your work, just use the time tracker and stay hyper-focused. It’ll total up the time and record the data for you.
Check out your progress with a weekly streak view to see how you’re doing. Green dots = good, red dots = try harder. It’s kind of like a cheering squad behind you, helping you get to where you need to go. Go you go!
Download links below
The iPad: Inspire Pro
Grab your paint smock and your imagination! Forget about the mess and annoying clean up. KiwiPixel is bringing all you oil painting artists, beginner to advanced, into the digital realm with Inspire Pro.
This fabulous app simulates what it’s like to use wet oil paint on canvas. Use its blending effects with five real kinds of brushes. Apparently it has the best colour blending capability on the App Store. Choose from two different canvas sizes and easily switch from portrait to landscape. If you’re prone to making mistakes, don’t fret. There are 1000 levels of undo and redo.
Paint choices are limitless and you can even save your favorites with a simple drag and drop. Want to stay consistent? The eye dropper tool lets you select paint colors already on the canvas. When you’re done, share your masterpiece through social media, in an email or save it in the gallery. Your paintings can also be exported at resolutions of up to 6 times the original using the free Inspire Exporter app. Oh, you fancy huh?
Download links below
The Mac: Mocks
This one goes to to all my Programmer and Designer friends. I’ve found a simple tool you can use to make high-fidelity UI mockups for iOS, iPad or iPhone applications. The people over at Celestial Teapot Software will let you include it in your arsenal of excellence for $9.99.
From laying out wireframes to visualizing model relationships, Mocks is ready to rock with a built-in collection of graphics depicting iOS UI controls and widgets. It also includes the essential features you’d expect like the diagramming and flow chart applications. Best of all, it’s all coming at you in a slick, single-window to get you hyper-focused.
Alignment guides will help keep you on the straight and narrow. Magnetic lines are there to make the designing process as streamlined and simple as possible. Plus, every Mocks composition is a multi-page document supporting Apple’s iCloud, AutoSave Version Browsing and Full-Screen feature in Lion and Mountain Lion.
Download links below
Game Of The Week: Bad Piggies
Rovio just released a new game yesterday and it’s already #1 in the iTunes App Store. A spin off from Angry Birds, the new game features the villains we were programmed to hate. Those Pig jerks are still after the Angry Birds’ eggs and now we’re supposed to help them. Sacrilege!
Prepare yourself for a change. The gameplay is completely different from Angry Birds. With Bad Piggies, your job is to create a device that flies, crawls, rolls, spins or crashes, ultimately getting the Pig safely to the eggs. There are a few objects you can use but it’s up to you to judge the course and make them the best mode of transport.
I played a couple levels and it’s pretty challenging, in the best way. You have to start by evaluating the course and see what kind of obstacles your Pig could come across. Then you build the vehicle that will help get him through it. You have to “think outside the box” and get creative with your devices. I’m looking forward to getting into this game on the weekend.
You can get your hands on your own Bad Piggies for $0.99 in the App Store. The game is available for iOS, OS X and Android. Windows 8 and Windows Phone coming soon.
Download links below
