Welcome to Friday, everyone. We have another big round of apps for you (if you can put Temple Run 2 down long enough to hear us out). We have a disciplinarian todo list manager, a yoga app for your iPad with AirPlay, a Roomba for you Mac’s desktop, a moderated discussion site, and a game that makes sure you know who to call. Here are the apps…
Table of Contents
iPhone/iPod Touch: CARROT
Is your todo list mocking you? Sitting there each day endlessly taunting you with an ever growing list of things that need to be done. Have you tried gamification and still can’t get motivated? Try CARROT, the abusive AI personal assistant. Now at least when your todo list mocks you, it’s actually mocking you. You enter your todo list in a similar manner to Clear. As you clear your tasks, you earn points, but even as you level up, you’re still judged on the amount of time it takes to clear tasks and how often you check in with the app. When you do level up, CARROT offers you a fortune, which usually predicts your grisly demise. You may not be able to carry GLaaDoS around in your pocket, but this is pretty close. CARROT is $0.99 and you can download it here.
iPad: iYoga Premium
You may have already given up your hardcore cardio workouts at the gym, but there is still hope for your workout resolutions at home. Rather than another stressful routine, why not try a more gentle workout with Yoga? Instead of trying to find a Yoga group down at the local Whole Foods, you can just get an instructor on your iPad. iYoga Premium has all the trappings of yoga — the teacher with the slightly too calm voice, and bells that ring as you change positions. The app is compatible with AirPlay mirroring so you can easily use you Apple TV to get an easier view from your yoga mat. The poses are both narrated and animated, making it easy to follow along. The app does a really good job of showing which muscles are supposed to be stretching and contracting, so you know if you’re doing it right. This is a nice easy workout with a variety of preset routines you can choose from along with a custom routine option. The initial app is $1.99, which gets you 81 poses, and you can unlock additional poses for another $4.99. You can download the app from the App Store here.
Mac: Clean
Do you keep a lot of extraneous files on your desktop? For a lot of Mac users the desktop becomes a sort of scratch pad for files. You save downloads there, screenshots, and quick text files you might need later. The problem is that at some point your desktop begins to be less of a desktop and more just a pile of files that you need to hide with your applications as quickly as possible. Clean tries to clean that up, but rather than simply committing all of your files to the Trash, Clean seeks to arrange them in folders for you. After it runs, Clean creates a folder by month or day in your Documents folder and moves your Desktop files there. You can run it manually or let it run in the background all the time. Clean is free and available from the App Store.
Web: Branch
Branch is the platform for open discussion with closed membership. It’s actually a pretty simple concept. The site lets a moderator filter out all those people who simply join a conversation to be antagonistic. There’s a lot of potential here as an idea, though I would like to see the ability to embed conversations rather than simply link to them. For many sites that simply lack comment sections, this is an easy way to start a conversation around their articles. You sign up using your Twitter account. You can try the app out here.
Game of the Week: Ghostbusters
For people of a certain age (Read: Old), these developers could have released an app that did nothing but play a loop of the Ghostbusters theme, and it probably would have been at the top of the app charts. Instead, with this new game, you get a mixture of a time management game and RPG. You go around town busting ghosts and collecting money and slime samples that allow you to unlock more levels in a tower. Sadly, the main Ghostbusters are here in name only, and there’ s an assortment of new b-team characters, but the game is fun enough to look the other way. This is a Freemium game, so be prepared to wait for the upgrades unless you’re willing to pay extra. Ghostbusters is free from the App Store.
