Chapter 18

Ten Apps Worth Paying For

In This Chapter

Akinator the Genie

Comics

OldBooth

Action Movie FX

WordsWorth Pro

iTeleport

Baseball Statistics

Dark Sky

Wallet

TurboScan

If you read Chapter 17, you know that lots of great free apps are available for your iPhone. But as the cliché goes, some things are worth paying for. In some cases, the apps in this chapter are free up front, but you have to part with some loot to fully take advantage of them. Still, none of the ten for-pay apps we've chosen as some of our favorites are likely to break the bank.

As you're about to discover, some of the apps on this list are practical and others are downright silly. The common theme? We think you'll like carrying these apps around on your iPhone.

Akinator the Genie

Did you play Twenty Questions as a kid? Akinator the Genie ($1.99) from Elokence is a loose variation that has you often scratching your head: “How did he get that?”

Basically, you think about a character, real or fictional, and the Akinator asks you a bunch of questions to try and figure out who is on your mind. The Akinator poses such questions as: “Is your character's gender female?” “Has your character ever been in a movie?” “Does your character really exist?” “Is your character famous?” Figure 18-1 shows one of the questions the Akinator asks when trying to solve the puzzle.

You respond by tapping Yes, Don't Know, No, Probably, or Probably Not. Several questions in, the Akinator takes a stab at whom he thinks is on your mind.

I knew I was beat thinking of New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning (see Figure 18-2) when the Akinator asked if my character was famous because of football and also had a well-known brother. The Akinator is a bit boastful, too — “Guessed right one more time!” — and he'll tell you how many times the character has already been played.

You can turn on a child filter to keep the game safe for the youngest players in your household.

The Akinator sometimes takes more than 20 questions to get to the answer, but stumping this genie is a rare occurrence. We are always entertained by the Akinator and strongly suspect you and your friends will be entertained as well.

Comics

We really love the Comics app. Not only do we find many of the latest comics and graphic novels in its web-based comic store on the same day as print versions hit the stores, but the selections include both DC and Marvel Comics, which publish Bob's all-time favorite: Spider-Man! Many of the titles are classics, including issue #1 of The Amazing Spider-Man. Released in 1963 for $0.12, a copy in excellent condition goes for at least $25,000 today! Thanks to the Comics app, we can enjoy this out-of-print classic in pristine condition on our iPhones for a mere $1.99. That's just too cool. Other comics are priced from $0.99 per issue.

One of the coolest features is called Guided View (motion comics), which looks great on an iPhone screen. It's difficult to describe in words and still images, but we're going to try anyway. First, take a look at a full page as it would appear in the printed version of the comic, as shown in Figure 18-3.

With Guided View, the first thing you'd see is Figure 18-4, left. When you tap in the right one-third of the screen, to indicate you're ready to read the next panel, the first panel slides off the left edge of the screen as the next panel (shown in Figure 18-4, right) slides onto the screen from the right.

We don't know of any other app that makes reading a comic so enjoyable on the small screen. And we're delighted that the Comics app's web store offers classic Marvel and DC titles, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Justice League, as well as new classics, such as The Walking Dead and Scott Pilgrim.

Amazon bought this app (and its maker, Comixology) in 2013, and it's not as good as it used to be. The current version requires you to visit the Comixology website to buy comics, which you then download to the Comics app. Before Amazon bought the Comics app, it had its own built-in comic bookstore, which made it more convenient and straightforward to buy a comic. We hope Amazon will reconsider and bring back the in-app store someday. However, even with the convoluted buying process, we still don't know of anything that offers a better reading experience for comics and graphic novels.

OldBooth

OldBooth (free or $0.99 per PhotoPack) is just plain fun. It lets you take any full-face photo and apply wonderfully goofy transformations to it. A picture is worth a thousand words, so we'll start this description with Figure 18-5, which clearly demonstrates just what it is that OldBooth does.

You get the picture, don't you? (Pun completely intended.)

Using OldBooth is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Select a gender and then select one of the 20 mask styles available for each gender.
2. Select a picture.

   You can either take a new photo with your iPhone's camera or select a picture from your iPhone's Photo library.

3. Resize the picture by pinching or unpinching, rotate the picture by pressing and dragging, and adjust the brightness of the picture, the mask, or both.

   When you're happy with the image, save it to your iPhone's Recently Added or Camera Roll album, where you can use it as wallpaper, email it to a friend, assign it to a contact, or just save it to the Photos app, where it will be exported to your Mac or PC the next time you sync and added to your Photo Stream automatically.

OldBooth is easy and lots of fun.

The free version of OldBooth comes with a limited number of masks. We predict that once you've tried it for free, you'll gladly shell out $0.99 each for the 1920s, 1980s, and 1950s PhotoPacks.

Action Movie FX

With Action Movie FX, it's a breeze to add big-budget Hollywood-style special effects to video you shoot with your iPhone. Action Movie FX comes from producer J. J. Abrams's Bad Robot Productions, best known for TV shows such as Alias and Fringe and feature films including Star Trek and Super 8. We expected it to be pretty good and it is — it may well be the most fun app we've ever used to make videos with an iPhone.

The free version features eight big-budget movie effects such as Missile Attack, Avalanche, and Meteor from Outer Space, as well as Phaser Fight and Photon Torpedoes from Abrams's epic theatrical release Star Trek into Darkness. In other words, Action Movie FX lets you add Hollywood-style special effects to your videos, so you can destroy people, places, pets, and other stuff in a variety of fun and interesting ways.

Making a video with Action Movie FX couldn't be easier. Just launch the app, select the scene you want to use, tap Start, and shoot a minimum of five seconds of video. It's better if the footage is of someone or something that will remain still, unlike Bob's dog Zeke, the slightly blurry miniature Vizsla in Figure 18-6.

When you've finished filming, you can adjust the timing as well as resize and reposition the special effects. When you're satisfied with your creation, your masterpiece appears after a bit of processing; you can then share it, save it to your Recently Added or Camera Roll album, trash it, adjust its timing again, or shoot another video.

The free effects are great, but we found ourselves wanting more and have purchased most (if not all) of the ten currently available FX packs for $0.99 each. They're mostly great, but our absolute favorites are The Jet (shown in Figure 18-7) and Alien Burst (refer to Figure 18-6).

The videos are HD, and look great in a text message or an email displayed on any device. The videos look fabulous on your iPhone, but also look surprisingly good on a bigger display such as the one on a Mac, a PC, or an HDTV.

Finally, you just can't beat the price — your first eight effects are free. But we're betting that you'll like it enough to pop for one or more 99¢ FX packs. Either way, we're pretty sure you'll have as much fun as we have adding special FX to your videos.

WordsWorth Pro

Being writers, we love a good word game, and one of our favorites so far is WordsWorth Pro ($1.99). You form words by tapping letters on the screen. Longer words using rarer letters (such as J, Z, and Qu, for example) score more points than shorter words with more common letters.

To make things interesting, the app includes certain special tiles, such as blue wild cards, green bonuses, and red timers, all shown in Figure 18-8. A gold tile (see Figure 18-9) helps you grow your score. The timer tiles are the most insidious; if their time runs out before you've used the letter, the game is over.

WordsWorth doesn't have a fixed time limit per game. Instead, it's level-based — each time you achieve the prescribed number of points, you advance to the next level. And, of course, the levels grow increasingly harder with more and rarer timed tiles, fewer vowels, and rarer consonants.

If you can't find any more words on the screen, you can shuffle the tiles by shaking your iPhone. But be careful: A limited number of shuffles are available for each level.

Although WordsWorth is simple, it's also engaging and addictive. And you can even compete against other players over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, or challenge your friends on Facebook.

A version called Wordsworth (without the Pro) is free and supported by advertising; this version is perfect for those who want to try the game before coughing up two bucks for the ad-free version.

Wordsworth Pro is only one of many terrific word-based games available for the iPhone. Another favorite worth checking out is a Boggle-like game called Wurdle from Semi Secret Software ($1.99). And Bob still loves playing Words With Friends (free) with his friends and family.

iTeleport

At $24.99, iTeleport isn't cheap and we admit that it is more than a little geeky, but it's so cool and potentially useful that we would have been remiss had we not included it.

iTeleport is technically a VNC (Virtual Network Computing, also known as remote screen control) client. Put another way, it's an iPhone app for controlling your Mac, Windows, or Linux computer “from a few feet away or from halfway around the world.”

Yes, you can actually see your computer screen and control its keyboard and mouse from anywhere in the world (as long as your iPhone can connect to the Internet through Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, EDGE, or whatever).

Figure 18-10 shows an iPhone running iTeleport, which is controlling a Mac in another room (though the Mac could just as easily be in a different city, state, or country). iTeleport is an iPhone app, so you pinch and unpinch to zoom in and out. In Figure 18-10, we zoomed in on the upper-left corner of the Mac screen, where a chapter is being edited in Microsoft Word.

There's little you can do on your Mac, PC, or Linux computer that you can't control remotely with iTeleport — though of course you're dealing with a smaller screen on the iPhone. We use iTeleport to check mail accounts other than the ones on our iPhones, to grab files from our hard drives and email them to ourselves (at our iPhone email addresses) or others, and to make sure backups are running when scheduled.

Another cool use for the app is as a spy cam. This feature requires that you have a computer with a built-in camera, such as an iMac or any of the MacBook models. Open an app that uses the built-in camera (for example, Photo Booth on the Mac or a webcam program under Windows), and you'll be able to watch what's happening in front of that computer on your iPhone no matter where in the world you happen to be.

Several free or less expensive VNC apps are available in the iTunes Store, but iTeleport is the only one we've found that is robust and reliable enough to recommend.

Baseball Statistics

Consider Baseball Statistics a dream app for a passionate baseball fan. One of the things that makes baseball such a great game is the statistics that have defined the sport since, well, the 19th century. (We won't add a steroids comment — oops, just did.) Baseball Statistics from Mark Knopper and Bulbous Ventures puts all those stats at your fingertips, so you can settle barroom bets or just relive memories of favorite ballplayers from when you were a kid.

The app has easily accessible yearly stats for every Major League player and team since 1871 — nope, we weren't around — from batting, fielding, and pitching statistics to team wins, losses, and attendance. As of this writing, the stats go through the 2013 season — heck, none of the 2014 pennant winners have been declared yet.

If a player has a Wikipedia entry, you can tap a button to see it. A baseball card feature displays a player's career stats, as if it were the back of a baseball card, when you rotate the iPhone to its side. We only wish we also could get a front baseball-card view with a picture of a uniform-clad player, but we're quibbling.

Poking around is fun. We found stats for outfielder Cherokee Fisher of the 1872 Baltimore Canaries. (Check out Figure 18-11 for evidence that the Canaries existed.) And to help decide one of those classic “who-was-better” debates, we compared Mickey Mantle's career stats to Willie Mays's.

Ed, a passionate New York Mets junkie, would gladly spring for the $2.99 tab, required for the latest season's statistics. Heck, that sum would have bought an awfully good seat at the ballpark when Tom Seaver was pitching brilliantly for the 1969 Miracle Mets. His stats from that season are shown in Figure 18-12.

Dark Sky

Yes, your iPhone comes with a fine weather app. And yes, you can find many other fine weather apps. But we rely on Dark Sky a lot because of the app's uncanny capability to inform us not only whether it will rain or snow at our current location but also when it rain or snow, down to the minute, and within one hour of the time that you begged the question. Figure 18-13 shows what the main Dark Sky screen looks like.

If you're ever been caught in a downpour without a raincoat or umbrella — and who hasn't?— you'll wish you had sprung for this $3.99 app.

You get some basic weather info too, including a detailed 24-hour forecast, a 7-day forecast, and details on wind, humidity, and pressure. Dark Sky will also let you know when the sun will rise and when it will set. Through some cool simulations, you can map the path of upcoming precipitation or even go back in time a few days. But for us, the real draw is the down-to-the-minute prediction feature, which in our experience has been right more often than wrong.

It's not necessary to keep the app open to get word of an impending storm; Dark Sky can dispatch a notification shortly before rain or snow is supposed to start.

Dark Sky is powered by a homegrown, and aptly named, weather service called Forecast.

As of this writing, Dark Sky works only in the United States (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico). As the producers of the app explain on their website: “The biggest obstacle is getting access to the radar networks in other countries — both from a technical and legal standpoint.” We inform you world travelers of this now, so you can seek other ways to avoid a soggy vacation.

Wallet

Many apps can securely store all your passwords on the iPhone, but we prefer Wallet ($9.99) from Acrylic Software. Backed by military grade security, it lets you store web passwords, serial numbers, credit card information, bank accounts, and more, as well as sync and access the information on all your iOS devices and Macintosh computers.

You sign into Wallet with a single password (see Figure 18-14). When a website seeks your security credentials, you can use the data stored in Wallet. You can sync over the air using Dropbox, WebDAV, or your local Wi-Fi.

Wallet can reset your password should you ever forget it. But doing so means that your entire Wallet database will be deleted. That's good from a security point of view, of course, but a hassle just the same. So choose a password that will be hard for anyone else to guess but easy for you to remember.

TurboScan

If you travel for work, your pockets are probably littered with business cards, expense receipts, notes, pictures, and documents. If only you could carry a scanner in your pocket to get all that paper into some semblance of order.

Stop dreaming. For $2.99, TurboScan turns your iPhone into one.

Piksoft's app lets you scan and spit out high-quality PDFs. TurboScan is fast — processing a page in less than four seconds — and can detect paper edges to help improve accuracy. And by tapping the SureScan 3x button, shown in Figure 18-15, you can take three pictures of the same document, and the app processes them into a single superior image. You can process scans in color or black-and-white.

After you've scanned a document, you can choose a name, choose an appropriate size (such as U.S. letter, receipt, or business card), and add a datestamp. Then you can email it to yourself as a PDF, PNG, or a JPEG, print it, or save it to your Recently Added or Camera Roll album (or another Photos album). You can also open it as a PDF to view in other apps on your iPhone that can read documents in the PDF format (such as CloudReaders, Evernote, or iBooks).