Apps from readers like you!
March is here, and so are your latest app reviews!
As expected, you guys filled up my inbox with great app submissions, so I’ve been busy playing with all your apps. There are some really cool ones this month.
This month we’ve got:
- A party game to call out your friends
- A powerful 2D animation tool
- A math game that will test your mind
- And naturally, much more!
Read on to see some fun, unique, and powerful apps made by readers like you.
Lastronaut
Lastronaut is one of the last humans on earth, running for their life to board the final rocket leaving the planet. And its simply beautiful.
Running in an adrenaline fueled haze with rockets and shotguns abound, you’ve got to dodge everything the sentinel army can throw at you. New weapons fall from the sky as gifts from the heavens to help you fight your way to the last rocket.
Controls are simple: jump and shoot with simple taps. GameCenter integrations makes sure you can brag to your friends as you expect. And there are an array of achievements to keep your running after your life is safe.
- Author: Darrin Henein @darrinhenein
- Most useful tutorial: How To Build a Monkey Jump Game Using Cocos2d 2.X, PhysicsEditor & TexturePacker – Part 1
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Creature
Creature is a new tool made by professional animator with experience animating hit movies such as Wall-e, Up, TS3, Brave.
Creature is designed to make complex and gorgeous animations out of static 2D images.
Creature has a ton of tricks. With skeletal animations you can give your character life and generate an entire range of movement. With physics simulations those skeletons become even more real as your tails bounce and your arms swing.
Creature also overs a variety of mesh deformations allowing even static images to flex and breath. As if you didn’t have enough at your fingertips, Creature supports motion capture from your camera to allow you to record your own movements and mimic them in your character animations!
Creature supports plenty of formats such as videos, gifs, sprite sheets, and image frames. It even has built in support for a number of popular game engines including Cocos2D, Unity, and more.
- Author: Jiayi Chong @KestrelmMoon
- Most useful tutorial: Cocos2D-X Tutorial: Making a Universal App: Part 1
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Cozy City
Cozy City is a unique puzzle game that leaves your planning a neighborhood with a variety of predetermined tiles.
The game begins by giving you a blueprint of tiles required for your city. You must use them in order on the grid below to build a city that satisfies the blueprint. No road can simply end cut off, it must end with a house or grass. Forks in the road must be managed carefully as they immediately send you down interesting paths.
Cozy City doesn’t always have one right answer, instead you’re left to solve the puzzle in your own way. Even how you pay can be up to you whether its careful upfront planning or a see as you go style. 50 levels should keep you busy as you decide if your next career will be city planner.
- Author: Nick Domenicali @dominsbeard
- Most useful tutorial: Intermediate Design Patterns in Swift
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Schemes
Schemes is an enormously powerful URL builder that takes advantage of iOS URL-Schemes to build unique and customizable workflows between applications.
Schemes can open other apps, take data from one app and send it to another. Really the sky is the limit as each app can supply its own actions and data that other apps can use. Schemes acts as the middle man by organizing those actions and allowing you to chain them into workflows.
Since any app can open up a URL-Scheme to enable communication between itself and other apps, Schemes will continue to expand as more and more apps take advantage of this powerful library.
- Author: Craig Pearlman @blackfog
- Most useful tutorial: Storyboards Tutorial in iOS 7: Part 1
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Makan Kaki
How many times have you and a few friends tried to setup an outing and simply can’t agree on a place or a time? If you’re like me, it’s many many times.
Makan Kaki is designed to solve that problem. The app allows you to create an event and invite your friends. Then everyone can suggest and vote on venues and times. The venues are sorted by votes and also offer reviews, directions, and a gallery of photos. Suggested a date makes it easy for friends to decide if they have the day available and vote accordingly.
You can login using Facebook to invite your friends, but you can also roll without an account. Makan Kaki will generate a URL for you share with friends as you please. When they open the URL they’ll be prompted for the app if they don’t have it, and if they do they’ll be taken to the event without the need to login either.
Push notifications will keep you updated on your friends updates as you finally manage to plan a painfree outing.
- Author: Zhengquan Qin
- Most useful tutorial: Learn To Code iOS Apps With Swift Tutorial
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Dice Mogul
Dice Mogul is a fun twist on a real estate board game.
Dice Mogul lets you build a proper empire as you circle the board a few times. As you circle you have the chance to buy properties. Once you own a property you can of course upgrade it to increase the damages when an opponent lands on it.
A large variety of powerups bring extra excitement and often mean flipping the tables on your opponents repeatedly. The available powerups include stealing a property, upgrading your properties, shielding from payments, and more.
Dice Mogul brings memories of monopoly nights with my family. Here’s to hoping a GameCenter multiplayer update lurks around the corner. ;]
- Author: Rob de Lara @OverTheTopGames
- Most useful tutorial: How to Save your Game’s Data: Part 1/2
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Pivots
Pivots is a new puzzle game with a dash a math.
Before I send you running for the hills, the math isn’t that complicated – and remember math isn’t scary!
With a grid of numbers, when a row totals 15, its eliminated then your timer and score are increased.
You play by rotating, or pivoting (get it?!?), numbers in groups of four. Simple drag your finger starting on one number and create a square of four numbers. They will rearrange allowing you to position numbers as you please.
You only get 60 seconds to best your highscore. Pivots without a row of 15 will cost you time. Each removed row gets you some extra time. As you advance the game will get faster and you’ll get score multipliers to take you to new heights.
- Author: Derek Clark @clarky07
- Most useful tutorial: How to Make a Game Like Candy Crush with Swift Tutorial: Part 1
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Pin Circle
Pin Circle is a delightfully simple timing based game made for casual play.
The premise is simple. There is a circle spinning in the middle of the screen that has a few pins in it. You’ll have a number of pins to add. Simply tap and the pin will hit the circle at the current location. Your mission is to get all the pins stuck to the circle without any overlapping pins.
The game will change directions, speed up, adjust patterns, and more to complicate the game. With over 400 levels you shouldn’t have a problem staying busy a while.
- Author: Duc Nguyen
- Most useful tutorial: Sprite Kit Tutorial: How to Make a Platform Game Like Super Mario Brothers – Part 2
- App Store Link: Check it out!
WeathAR
WeathAR is perhaps the most unique weather app yet.
WeathAR doesn’t simply have a list of locations with cute icons. No, that wasn’t good enough for WeathAR.
Instead, after entering a few locations you frequently want the weather for, you can simply point your iPhone in that direction and WeathAR will use your GPS and compass to choose which city to tell you the weather for.
WeathAR is a delight to use with its playful animations and unique Augmented Reality interface. You’ve certainly never checked the weather like this.
WeathAR uses date from Forecast.io so you should find it helpfully accurate and up-to-date.
- Author: Shaun Merritt
- Most useful tutorial: iOS 7 Best Practices; A Weather App Case Study: Part 1/2
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Files Board
Files Board is a powerful file browser and organizer for your iPhone and iPad.
Files Board will let you browse, organize, and store files on your iOS device covering photos, documents, videos, music, etc. It checks all the important features like folders, filtering, searching, favorites, copying, etc. It also supports zip files as well as uncompressing them, even encrypted.
Files Board as has a really cool pro feature that turns your iOS device into a local webserver for your network and allows you to update files over the air from your Mac. A must have for anyone transferring files from their Mac to their iPad for presentations and such.
- Author: Bohdan Hernandez
- Most useful tutorial: Grand Central Dispatch In-Depth: Part 1/2
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Callouts
Callouts is a party game you and your friends will love.
Callouts is simple: you and your friends join a local game, then questions are asked to the group. They’re simple questions always about the group of people playing. So it could be something like “Who’s the goofball?” Everyone picks their answer and then the game reveals to everyone who was the most selected.
The covered answers that lead up to the big reveal lend to the tension in the room as everyone chuckles to themselves about the question. Careful with all that chuckling though because the next question could be about you. >;]
- Author: Roy Hermann @calloutsapp
- Most useful tutorial: Image Processing in iOS Part 1: Raw Bitmap Modification
- App Store Link: Check it out!
Honorable Mentions
Every month I get more submissions than I can handle. I give every app a shot, but I can’t write about them all. These are still great apps made by readers like you. Its no a popularity contest or even a favorite picking contest. I just try to get a glimpse of what the community is working on through your submissions. Take a moment and checkout these other great apps I didn’t have time to showcase properly.
Flight Tracker
shapesly
Greenchick 2
Matching Shapes
RainMM
Boob-Tube
Coubbles
First Draw
Coloria
Angle Clash
Kill Sector
FaceDash
Magic Wanda
Pregnancy Recorder Pro
Color-Pong
Know – Social Proximity
Where To Go From Here?
Each month, I really enjoy seeing what our community of readers comes up with. The apps you build are the reason we keep writing tutorials. Make sure you tell me about your next one, submit here!
If you saw an app your liked, hop to the App Store and leave a review! A good review always makes a dev’s day. And make sure you tell them you’re from raywenderlich.com; this is a community of makers!
If you’ve never made an app, this is the month! Check out our free tutorials to become an iOS star. What are you waiting for – I want to see your app next month!
Readers’ App Reviews – March 2015 is a post from: Ray Wenderlich
The post Readers’ App Reviews – March 2015 appeared first on Ray Wenderlich.