Fresh Apps - iPhone Apps & iPod Touch Apps.

Description:

Succeed at weight loss with Lose It! Set goals and establish a daily calorie budget that enables you to meet them. Stay on track each day by recording your food and exercise and staying within your budget.

Enter food and exercise easily using a searchable database. Quickly re-enter foods and meals you’ve had in the past. Lose It! together with friends for additional support and motivation. Setup motivators to help keep you on track. Use detailed online reports to track your progress.

Lose It! is the most complete and streamlined weight loss application for the iPhone.

What’s New in Version 2.2
Set up reminders to keep you logging
+ Set up reminders under ‘More > Motivators’
+ Choose when you’d like Lose It! to remind you to log

Description:

iBarnyard is a fun little trip to the farm on your phone. Go inside the barn, pick a silly cartoon animal and listen to the sound it makes. The first version features nine animal sounds and two modes to choose from.

Simple Mode plays the animal sounds with a touch of the main screen. Learning Mode is designed for older children (or bored adults) and shows the word associated with the animal, offers a pronunciation and plays the animal’s sound.

iBarnyard is great for kids of all ages and is an all-around fun little English-language learning application for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Description:

Discover music with the touch of your finger. The number one Internet Radio service comes to the iPhone. Pandora offers not only great music and a simple interface, but the experience of music discovery. With Pandora you will likely stumble upon artists you have never heard of before. That is part of what makes Pandora so much fun. It’s a great way to enjoy and discover music for free.

Pandora is an Internet Radio application. You simply sign up for a free account, so that Pandora can keep track of your likes and dislikes. When you log in you have the option of making a new station.  From here you can choose a genre, an artist, song or composer. Pandora will then put together a radio station based on styles that match the genre or are similar to the song, artist or composer you chose.

While listening to music in Pandora, you can choose to give the song a thumbs up, a thumbs down or just skip the song altogether.  Tilting your iPhone to a landscape orientation, you will get a Cover Flow-style interface where you can browse the songs you have listened to by cover art. Double-tapping the cover art will flip it around and give you some information about the artist or the song. One of the best features of Pandora is the ability to buy a song you’ve listened to on iTunes. Tap the triangle on the lower bar to bring up a small menu, and from here you can bookmark the song, the artist, or buy from iTunes and even email the station to a friend.

Pandora is a free service and a great app to have around; however, it does require that you be connected to the internet. So if you have an internet connection and are into music or want to discover some artists you may not know, I recommend you pick up Pandora right away.

Description:

Get all your news with a touch of your finger. Newsstand is one of those hidden gems. I actually had to do a bit of research before I even found out about it. From OMZ:Software, makers of the popular delicious.com app Tags. With it’s simplistic design and “Newsstand” function this is one of the best RSS aggregators I’ve seen on the iPhone.

Newsstand is simple, easy to use, and fun. You start out by adding your feeds, which is made easy. You only have to enter in the host website’s URL, e.g. www.freshapps.com. It will then find the RSS feed and add it to your list. Each feed in your list is represented by the name and the favicon of the sight it is from. For those who don’t know, a favicon is the small icon that shows up on the address bar of the most web browsers.

You can create folders and categories to organize your feeds, which is extremely useful. As you would expect, you can file down into each feed, by choosing the feed, then the story and so on. Of course, one of the most important features of an RSS reader is the “mark all as read” button, which is represented as a check mark in the lower right corner.

Newsstand has a built in web browser, now it’s no alternative to safari, but it is very clean and simple. With a farward, back, done and Open Safari button is is completely what I would expect in a good RSS reader.

While viewing posts I like the ability to flag them, as well as post them to delicious.com or send them as email. The theme feature has potential but right now seems a bit forced and gimmicky so i don’t really bother with it personally.

These features alone are enough to make a worthy RSS reader, but Newsstand takes it a step further with it’s take on Cover Flow. Turn your device in landscape orientation and you are presented with — go figure — a newsstand! You can drag through your different “newspapers”, then double tap one to open it up and see what is inside. Now I have to admit that inside the newspaper the interface does not live up to the rest of the app — it is rather simple to the max — but it gets the job done and isn’t a problem at all. You can then double tap an article to open it in the Safari browser and finish your news there.

Newsstand has earned itself a place on my iPods app dock, right next to Mail. I use it almost as much, checking the latest news on Engadget and Gizmodo and, of course, Freshapps.com! Newsstand is the most feature rich and seamless RSS application on the app store as of right now, it feels solid, complete and smooth. If you follow a lot of blogs, have a hunger for news and or $5 to spend, then I suggest you pick up Newsstand from the iTunes App Store today.

For those who are looking for a free alternative, keep your eye out, I’ll be writing a roundup of the best FREE RSS readers for the iPhone soon. Let me know what you use and what you think. I’m always happy to get feedback even if it isn’t the most positive.

Description:

When old school gamers wax nostalgic about old school games, its rarely because we want to go back and play the exact same games we played back when the Atari was king.  Yars Revenge, for instance, looses its luster after about 10 years.  More often then not, we want NEW games that play like or remind us of some of the games we grew up with… except with with bright shiny graphics appropriate to our times.  If this sounds like you, then the game you are searching for is Blue Attack!

The idea of Blue Attack! is that you fly your main fighter ship with and entourage of wingmen around a large battlefield with red enemy ‘battleships’ spawning in as you progress through the level.  Your enemies are on a collision course with the big blue planet at the center of the map and its your job to destroy them before they get there.  To do this, you must blast away the outside layers of their ships composed of a myriad of geometric defenses and attack their hearts which are usually shaped like big frowny or angry faces.  Once you complete a level, you get to use the points you earn to upgrade your ship with modifiers to make your ship shoot better, fly faster, move differently or hold additional lives or bombs.

You control your fighter by tilting the iPhone either forward, backward, left, or right.  This will change the direction of flight and the amount of tilt determines acceleration.  There are 4 buttons along each side of the screen.  Some are for special weapons like bombs, others add/remove wingmen behind to your ship, and others allow you to use special power ups that help you change the direction of flight.  Your guns are set to auto-fire saving you an unnecessary button in an already crowded set of panels.  And all of these controls are setup using one of the best control configuration utilities of any game I’ve seen so far for the iPhone.  It lets you reconfigure how far you want to tilt, the threshold for the tilt dead-zone, and which buttons go where… you name it!

Visually, Blue Attack! is a deceptively simple looking game, with graphics that seem to borrow heavily from an asteroids meets the 21st century approach that has done wonders for games like Geometry Wars.  All the objects in the game are composed of bright and vibrant lines, colored according to the side they are on.  But this game really stands out because of its use of scale.  Take the enemy battleships for instance: the size and shape of these ships actually make them frightening to see when you first approach.  You will easily be intimidated as you fly around some of the largest enemies trying to find a weak spot you can blast through to most efficiently get to their hearts before they hit your planet.

In the end, I absolutely loved this game and have played it quite a few times already!  I haven’t spent $1.99 on something I’ve enjoyed this much in the App Store in quite a while, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes a fun shooting game with depth, action and strategy.  Throw into the mix a fantastic tutorial, one of the best control configuration utilities around, and an art style that adds to the fun, and you’ll be recommending this game to all your friends in no time!

Rating: 4.5 Stars

Pros:

• Fun ‘old school’ shooter
• Easy to learn, difficult to master
• Superb tutorial
• Fairly fun power ups
• Frighteningly huge bosses
• Simple artistic approach is rich and vibrant

Cons:

Description:

Like shooting games? Really like the color blue? Check out Blue Attack! Jump into your blue fighter plane and, using either the accelerometer or your trusty finger, guide your ship through multiple levels (and one “infinite” mode) filled with enemies.

Controls: With two options for controlling your ship, everyone should be able to find their perfect setting. If you choose to use your finger, movement is a simple as tapping in the direction you would like to fly. Unfortunately, and for no apparent reason, using these controls removes your ability to stand still, which you can do using the accelerometer controls, which I opted to use. After calibrating the controls, and with a little practice (if you calibrate before the tutorial, by the end, you’ll be fine) I found them to be exceptionally usable. Your ability controls, satisfyingly large and slightly transparent squares, are places unobtrusively off to the side, where they are easily accessible during the heat battle. These buttons are user mappable, which is a big plus.

Look and Feel: Being pretty is definitely something the app does well. The apps look seems to be centered around an RGB color scheme and very soft edges. It has a calming effect on me, despite the intense fighting. An A+ for sure.

Game Play: The object is to destroy your enemies before they destroy you or your mother ship. Enemies are vast clusters of obs centered around a special orb with a face (not a “:-)” face. more of a “:-O” looking one). Killing the face orb will exterminate all of the plain orbs it controls. Unfortunately, the plain orbs get in the way of the face. Orbs, however, aren’t the only threat in the game, so look out! Your skills, which are all upgradeable, include AOE damage, speed boost, a “push” ability, and more. You also have the ability to purchase and use wing men (sweet) and put them into formations (sweeter) that actually affect their maneuverability and firing pattern (sweetest!). There is an option to get an amazingly useful “strafe” ability, but it costs upgrade points, which bugged me to no end. Another shortcoming is the lack of ability buttons. There are more abilities than there are mappable spaces. I guess it adds another level on which you have to think and plan for a level.

All in all this is a great app, and well worth the 2$.

Description:

Browse the web free from clutter! The Full Screen Web Browser from SOPODS is a true full-screen web browser available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This app gives you up to 40% of your screen’s real estate back by hiding the buttons, address and even the status bar when you don’t need them. Now you can take full advantage of the ample screen on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

How does it work? Simple! Give your iPhone or iPod Touch a shake to bring the buttons and address bar into view, then enter a URL and the control bars will slide out of view for a true full-screen experience. Surf the web exactly like you do in Safari: tap on links, swipe to scroll, double-tap or even pinch and spread your fingers to zoom in or out.

Full screen web browsing
25% more viewable area than Safari in portrait mode
Almost 40% more viewable area than Safari in landscape mode!
Same web browsing experience as Safari on the iPhone: tap links, scrolling, zooming, etc.
Back and forward buttons for easy navigation through your session history
Horizontal/Landscape support
Horizontal mode is fully supported. Rotate your device right or left for larger and easier to read text and larger images. The address and button bars are also available when your device is rotated-just give it a shake!

Private web browsing
Full Screen does not save any history of your activity on the web between sessions. Recent activity is only used for the “back” and “forward” actions. Simply tap the home button and your browsing history is gone.

Complete Safari Integration
Send any web page to Safari whenever you like by tapping the action button and then “Open in Safari”
Send any web page back to Full Screen from Safari using our custom bookmark.
Set Homepage
Have Full Screen load your favorite page when it first launches. Your homepage can be easily set by tapping the action button and then the “Set as Home Page” button while you are on the page. The homepage address can also be set in the iPhone Settings app.

Send a Link
Email anyone a link to a web page by tapping the action button and then “Email Link”.

Description:

Site Check provides Phishing and Malware protection to help keep you safe online.

It uses the same technology as Firefox and Desktop Safari, the Google Safe Browsing API, to provide you with the latest security information.

First, Add our simple bookmark (http://bit.ly/gositecheck) to Safari.

When you reach a page you are unsure about just open your bookmarks and click Site Check.

It will open and check your link against Google’s database of suspicious sites.

If the site is OK, you can return to Safari or you can report it to Google.

To check a link you can:

- Use bookmark (setup via http://quinagh.com/sitecheck/)

- Open Site Check and type the URL into the search bar.

- In mobile Safari add checkit:// to the start of the url to launch Site Check with the URL pre-filled.

Use it to help protect against phishing attacks like the recent Twitter DM one.

Updates are fast, only changes since last update are downloaded, and you can check links while offline.

- Each day of updates is about 300-400kb. It is probably best done over wifi or 3G.

- Update daily and before you check for best protection

Privacy Note: The only information sent to Google is the current version of your database.

Description:

Send/Receive free SMS messages to US numbers.

• Send text messages FREE
• Receive SMS replies FREE
• Add 2-way SMS to your iPod touch
• Messages don’t show up on phone bill
• Send to US numbers, even from outside USA
• Use your gmail account; no other sign-up

Messages sent/received through Google. See:

http://innerfence.com/sms

Description:

A unique literary experience at the touch of your finger. Classics takes reading books on the iPhone in a new direction. With its gorgeous interface and obsessive attention to detail, it is by far one of the most beautiful apps you can buy. The creators of Classics were intent on recreating the look and feel of reading a real book. From the way the pages turn to organizing your bookshelf, Classics far surpasses expectations.

With Classics you are given a set of  wonderful books with beautiful cover art. Tales like “Alice in Wonderland”, “Robinson Crusoe,” and quite a few others are available to read. Each book is carefully formatted to fit into the Classics experience. The table of contents allows you to jump to any chapter and each page holds only as much as it can. The text is made large enough so that it is easily readable, but small enough so that a decent amount of content fits onto each page. The designers of Classics also make custom covers for some of the books and make sure to include any illustrations that were in the original books themselves.

Classics departs from the traditional idea of e-readers by providing you with the books instead of having you buy and upload your own. When you buy Classics, you get all the current books in the collection, but you also get free updates. The team behind Classics is working to add more and more content to the collection and every time a new book is ready, it is included in the free updates. Classics is my personal favorite e-reader application. Nothing comes close to the experience offered by Classics.  This gem is a must have for any fan of classic literature. Worth far more than it costs at only $2.99, you would be foolish to pass up such an wonderful addition to your app collection.