Favorite Apps thread

[Josh]

Well! Let's talk about the apps we put on our phones, tablets, or whatever else is taking apps these days. Me, I'm a Droid user but I suppose if you're one of those granola-eating hipster Mac people you can also post your overpriced software as well.

Utility Apps:

Lightning Bug: The best sleepy noise maker I've found so far. I'd really be totally up on it if it had a decent music+rain track, but overall it's good and I also use it for my morning alarm music too. Nothing gets you up faster than hearing the opening lines of 'Let the Bodies hit the Floor' and knowing that you only have a few seconds to cut it off before it blasts you clean out of bed.

Google Drive: I think it's running standard on most Droids these days. Since most of my writing work starts out as a Gdoc, this is essential for reviewing materials.

Talking Translator Pro is a damn good translation program (for Spanish, at least) with one drawback- it's entirely signal dependent, so naturally when you need it most to convince the Federale that you don't have more money in your other sock, you're boned.

Nook Reader is sooooooo much better than the Kindle App. Animated page flips make a world of difference and I wish Amazon would realize that.

Accuweather: I used to go with Weatherbug because I liked the interface, but it got stodgy and creaky and then finally it kept insisting it was Tuesday for over a week and I gave up on it. Accuweather is nice, gives you hourly temp and weather projections and some extremely optimistic two-weeks-ahead forecasts.

Pulse News: Flipboard is apparently the new hotness, but I'm fond of Pulse. I keep mine set to three sections, News/Science/Sports, and it's great for when I'm waiting in line.

Mortplayer: Not super-sold on this one- with the wonky tagging on my older MP3s it can be a real chore sorting my music sometimes, but it... plays music, right? Pretty basic stuff.

Games!

AI Factory's Sudoku: Out of all the sudokus I've tried, AI Factory produces the cleanest and most playable one. Unfortunately there are only three hundred puzzles per level and I've played all the hardest level ones down to under twenty minutes. Pretty much every AI Factory game I've seen is well-done.

All Trese Brothers Games: These guys rock. They have a freeform space trader game, a Space Hulk game, and a cyberpunk game flavored like the old Sega Shadowrun. They have some bug issues, but they patch continuously and support the hell out of their games. A couple of visits to their forum gave the appearance that they're very responsive to customer feedback, too.

Plague Inc.: Anyone who spent too many hours trying to wipe out all human life on earth in the old Pandemic game...

FUCK MADAGASCAR. Seriously, it's one corner of this Earth that I know pretty much nothing about besides its location, but fuck the asshole country that shuts its port down every time somebody in Europe sneezes. Fuck them fuck them fuck them.

ANYWAY... you'll recognize this game as a beautifully updated descendant. Madagascar buys it a lot more often now, though the pair that will set you bitching is now usually Iceland and especially fucking Greenland, where half the time if you ramp up your lethality too quickly the plague will burn itself out and leave a few thousand survivors in what otherwise would've been a perfect clean sweep of life as we know it.

Choice of Games: For the folks who remember nostalgically reading the old Choose Your Own Adventure books in the eighties, or their much cooler variants like Interplanetary Spy or Time Machine, or the surprisingly brutal for young readers James Bond series, this is a somewhat not quite-as-good version of those. I miss the older books that had more branch in their storylines, whereas Choice of Games tend to run down more railroaded storylines. That said, they're still pretty fun. My personal fave is Eerie Estate Agent. Also for the writerly among us, they have their own hosting setup that retains full IP control with a 25% royalty, as well as in-house writing positions that will provide the same royalty as well as house editing services, art and so on. (Or even a flat no-IP 10K per story.) I'm seriously considering putting some material out through them in the next bit of a while.

SO.

What are y'all's apps?

[Charon]

[rhoenix]

I'm still pretty impressed with jquery, though it's more a library for javascript than it is a real program.

[Josh]

Now it's Greenland, and they at least wait until shit's getting real. The big problem you can have there and in Iceland is that you're waiting waiting for them to get infected, then you have to wait a bit longer for the infection to get solidly rooted before you can ramp up lethality.

[Josh]

Something just occurred to me.

In the distant future when I'm at the Hague being confronted by the teary-eyed relatives of people who were on the island at the time, this whole thing is going to be kind of hard to explain in a fashion that doesn't make me seem at least a bit off.

[Josh]

Also: Populous Romanus, a fun little Panzer General-style TBS game.

[Josh]

Dark Horse Comics app

For reading comics on a mobile, this is probably as good as you're going to get. It has an automatic zoom to the next panel feature that is a lifesaver for reading on a phone.

[Josh]

Elder Signs: Omens

I am in love with this game. I have the boardgame, and it's very very true to that. The tension is fucking nuts in this game, with your investigators progressively falling apart as they race to save the world. (Yep, it's Cthulhu.)

[B4UTRUST]

Fantasy Kingdom Defense

A fun little tower defense game that I've been playing here recently.

[Josh]

I fucking beat Cthulhu!

It was down to the mercenary, and I had to roll the equivalent of snake eyes on one try to do it, but I like to think he shotgunned that giant snotbag right back into hell.

On the other hand I'm having a bitch of a time with the Ithaqua expansion. I almost had it, but my last two surviving investigators ended up out in the wilderness, wounded, with no equipment, and surrounded by wolves.

Then it got worse.

[B4UTRUST]

I tried to download that app, Josh and it kept telling me attempting to download resources for like 3 hours before I gave up. Not sure whats up with it.

[Josh]

Hunh. It hung a bit when I installed it on my tablet, I thought that was because of my crappy bandwidth and/or the auto-sleep. So to get around the autosleep I just put another app on to keep the tablet from sleeping and it finished downloading.

If you can get it, it's hellacious fun. I'm still having a fuck of a time trying to beat Ithaqua.

I wish they'd make a Droid version of the BSG boardgames like this.