Every week, the editors and writers at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include several iPhone and iPad games, a social app that helps you find interesting people to follow, and an app (for non US folk) that gives away free content and apps.
Discovr People is a great concept with a beautiful app behind it. If you ever have issues finding quality users to follow on Twitter, Discovr People is a great way to get there. Once launching the app you can type in any username you'd like to see their network and recent interactions. If you know people that engage with people that share the same interests with you, those are the usernames I would search for.
I used Discovr People recently to search for the followers on Twitter that I interact with the most. From there I looked at the people they'd have the most recent interactions with. I actually ended up finding quite a few interesting people that won't clutter up my timeline with pointless retweets and memes. You can view their profiles right within Discovr People as well as follow them and add them to lists. For free, what more could you ask for?
Twelve Days of Christmas - Chris Oldroyd
This week, being Christmas week, I have chosen Apple’s annual free app “Twelve Days of Christmas” that gives away free content for twelve days after Christmas.
The app gives away apps, books and music content every day starting from December 26th and it is well worth grabbing. You will receive a push notification each day of the promotion to remind you to get your free content.
So far Apple has given away a music EP, a football game and a TV episode from the really popular series “Sherlock”. The downside is that the app is available in loads of places with the exception of the US App Store. If you haven’t got it already, make sure you do as there are still 9 more days to go!
Game of Thrones companion - Joseph Keller
If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire series of books, or their adaptation, the Game of Thrones television series on HBO, you know that the world created by George R.R. Martin is very dense. The Game of Thrones Companion is your go-to reference guide for that world. The Companion contains the full details of characters, houses, cities, and more. Also included are several maps of all of the major locations in the series. But one of the best features of this app are the spoiler settings, which allow you to set which book you have read, up through the latest one. This way, you don't accidentally spoil yourself before you’ve had a chance to read the later books, and after you’ve finished each successive volume, you can update your spoiler settings accordingly. The Game of Thrones Companion is available for $2.99. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you should definitely give it a look.
Clay Jam is an imaginative free-to-play game that has players amassing clay by rolling a ball over various colorful and wacky monsters. Players have to dig a trench for a ball to roll through by tracing a path ahead of it, and as it rolls over monsters, the ball gets bigger, enabling it to pick up bigger ones. In that way, it's a lot like Katamari Damacy, but be careful to avoid things that are too big, or else you'll just bump right off them and lose some clay. There are optional missions for each stage that reward extra clay, which can be used to unlock new levels and monsters. Clay Jam is a ton of fun, and though it's very kid-friendly, even us grown-ups will enjoy playing a few rounds. You'll be surprised by how good an app made of clay looks.
Hill Climb Racing isn't so much my pick, as it is my husband's pick for the week -- which is precisely why I'm choosing it. You see, my husband is what one would call a "gamer", but on the PC, on the iPhone or iPad, yet he is totally addicted to Hill Climb Racing right now. It's a physics based driving game where the goal is to drive as far as possible; it can be classified is a "runner" (only you're driving, not running). You must use the gas and break to control the speed of your car to prevent from flipping your car and breaking the driver's neck. Hill Climb Racing is both challenging and addicting.
Avengers: The Initiative - Rene Ritchie
I'm fully capable of not liking things that are brilliant. There are plenty of great movies, filled with incredible vision and talent, that just aren't to my tastes. By the same token, I adore quite a few things that, empirically, aren't very good, including terrible martial arts movies, and bad comic book adaptions. It's into that last category that Avengers: The Initiative falls. As a game unto itself, it's a poor -- really poor -- clone of Infinity Blade with nowhere near the tightness of control, and even more repetitiveness.
But right out the gate, you could play as the Hulk.
Read that again. Infinity Blade, but you could play as the %$#@ Hulk. Yeah. Smash.
And now a bad thing has gotten even better. Avengers: The Initiative has been updated to better support the iPad mini, as well as the Phone 5 and iPod touch 5's 16:9 widescreen. They've also added the Hulk's Mr. Fixit look from the classic Peter David era (though in green, not gray, sigh), added a new location, the Hydracarrier (think Hellicarrier but more neo-Nazi), and new enemies like the Task Master.
And they've added a new playable character, Captain America.
That's right. %$#@ Captain America.
Would that the their game-crafted skill matched their feature intentions!
But just like I enjoy the hell out of really cheesy movies and TV shows, I'm enjoying the hell out of Avengers: The Initiative.
Normally $6.99, but right now it's on sale for the cheap, cheap price of FREE.
Your choice?
Now that we've chosen our favorites for the week, we want to hear yours! Did you pick up a killer app, accessory, or game this week? Let us know in the comments below!
We've all thought it, but never dared think it could be true: what if Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL actively monitor our instant messenger chats? What if mentions of 'bomb' and 'underage' are tracked and sent to law enforcement agencies? What if chat providers don't agree with the things we say, or the links we share, and filter or censor the content of our transmitted messages?
