Readers’ App Reviews – August 2014

August is almost over, and that means its time to showcase some more apps from readers like you!

Each month readers submit a ton of apps for me to review and showcase. This month was no exception, with over 50 apps submitted. As always, I sat down and gave them all a try and picked a few to share with you.

This month we’ve got:

• An app for the perfect color
• A way to remember all those borrowed books
• An alternative to selfies
• And a game where your cat saves the galaxy!

Better hurry, these apps aren’t going to download themselves!

Color Mate

Color Mate is a must have tool for all of us.

Color Mate is packed with features. You can pull colors from pictures, generate random colors on the fly, convert colors from Hex to RGB to HSB to CMYK, analyze colors for temperature and pantones, find shades and tints, and of course save your favorites.

Color Mate also supports searching for colors by name looking through multiple open source dictionaries like Moroney, Wikipedia, and even XKCD.

There isn’t a more full featured color tool out there. You need this today!

• Author: David Williames
• Most useful tutorial: How to Submit Your App to Apple: From No Account to App Store, Part 2
• App Store Link: Check it out!

Freely – Time Tracking & PDF Invoices

Freely helps you track your time quickly and easily. And at the end you can send out an invoice of your time straight from the app.

Freely lets you track your time for both Projects as a whole and individual tasks within the project. You can track time off and on for individual tasks so its easy to spread work over several days. It also offers beautiful graphs for a project or week to help you visualize your work.

And you can attach your hourly rate to each project and use it to calculate estimates or final amounts. Then simply add a logo and some client info and you’ll have an invoice ready to go.

• Author: Nikolay Yanev @codemotionapps
• Most useful tutorial: iOS Design Patterns
• App Store Link: Check it out!

Battle Pet Galaxy

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if your pet were defending the universe? Wonder no longer!

Battle Pet Galaxy lets your pet save the galaxy from the evil space bunny and his minions. The main character is quite literally your pet. You take a photo of your pet, adorn them with space helmets or cowboy hats, then send them into space where they battle other animals out to destroy the galaxy.

With over 20 different helmets to put on your pet, they’ll be ready for anything. And if they’re just too cute to let go, you can always share a picture of them.

• Author: Kevin Kazmierczak @kazmiekr
• Most useful tutorial: Sprite Kit Tutorial: Animations and Texture Atlases
• App Store Link: Check it out!

Censie

In a world of privacy gone awry, Censie offers a very useful and easy way to make our photos a little more private.

Censie does live image processing to pixelate areas of the photo you choose. You can just tap where you’d like it censored, or let facial recognition handle it for you.

Censie also wipes sensitive data like location and camera model from your photos. And since Censie does its censoring on live untaken pictures, no uncensored version of the photo is ever at risk of accidentally popping up.

• Author: Lukas Kukacka
• Most useful tutorial: iOS 7 Blur Effects with GPUImage
• App Store Link: Check it out!

Trickshot – Football Edition

Trickshot is like playing mini golf mixed with pinball. And its some addicting fun!

Just pull back and the ball goes flying, but aim carefully. You’ve got to get it into the hole with as few kicks as possible.

Trickshot has over 50 levels, GameCenter integration for leaderboards and achievements, and local multiplayer up to 4 players.

• Author: Jan Willms
• Most useful tutorial: How To Make A Simple iPhone Game with Cocos2D 3.0 Tutorial
• App Store Link: Check it out!

The Gamer’s Reader

The Gamer’s Reader is a great news aggregator for all things games. Its got a crisp clean design and news collected from over 30 sites. You can organize it by categories or by sites.

The Gamer’s Reader has 5 different themes and customizations for fonts, text sizes, margins, line spacing, and more. You can view raw websites or let it turn your content in a cleanly designed single page article.

The Gamer’s Reader also help you find all the videos in a dedicated video section. And if you’re not ready to read now, you can always save to read later or offline.

• Author: Adrien Long @thegamersreader
• Most useful tutorial: Text Kit Tutorial
• App Store Link: Check it out!

Super Game About Squares

This puzzle game is easy to play, but hard to master. Your goal is to get colored squares over their matched circle.

Squares have a color and a direction. Tapping them moves them their current direction. But you’ll have to be wise about your order of moves to make sure you get each square where it needs to go. And at higher levels squares can change direction when passing over certain triangles.

All in all its a very addicting and fun puzzle game. Its relaxing to play on your own time, but the puzzles definitely get challenging.

• Author: Leonid Peancovschi @lpeancovschi
• Most useful tutorial: Introduction to CocoaPods Tutorial
• App Store Link: Check it out!

PopSpell Ninja – Spelling for Kids

Kids always learn better with some fun, and PopSpell Ninja delivers.

With over 390 words and illustrations there is a lot to learn. And it comes in English, French, Spanish, and Italian!

Gameplay is fun and simple. Letters appear over the illustration in bubbles and a quick ninja swipe puts it in the blanks for the word. All you need to do is pop them in order to spell the word illustrated.

You can play random mode for any word or select from a number of categories like animals or food to help kids learn more related words.

• Author: Laurent Denoue @ldenoue
• Most useful tutorial: Sprite Kit Tutorial: How to Make a Platform Game Like Super Mario Brothers – Part 2
• App Store Link: Check it out!