There are over 425,000(!) apps for iOS devices. No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of apps. Some are exclusive to the iPad, while others work best of iPhones and iPod Touches. All vying for your attention.
With so many apps around it’s becoming tougher for developers to find something that doesn’t already have an app for that. It’s a tall order.
Here’s a good idea - create an app that tells you how to use your iPhone. Include all sorts of info about the different built-in and included apps and services, and update it whenever a new feature appears.
Make sure there are plenty of photos and screen shots, and make it well organized so that anyone can find the help they need quickly and easily. Include tips and tricks to help people get the most out of their iPhone.
Best of all, make all that helpful goodness available for free.
Good thing Apple provides such a manual, right?
Well, actually, Apple doesn’t, but Daemgen, makers of the popular ProCamera app, does, and they’ve done a bang-up job too. iCademy is truly the instruction manual we all should have gotten with our iPhones.
Wanna know about AirPlay streaming? Got an app that keeps freezing on you? Need to figure out how to connect that fancy Bluetooth headset? Piece of cake. iCademy has you covered on all of that and more.
There are eleven ‘chapters’, starting with ‘General Usage’. The rest focus on a certain aspect of the iPhone, like printing or email. And since Daemgen made iCademy who can blame them for a little self-promotion by including a chapter on ProCamera?
What’s more, the help also includes the use of Apple iPhone accessories, like the Apple headsets.
iCademy is a great app made greater because it’s free, and, if you don’t count the aforementioned self promotion, it is ad-less.
Even if you think you know everything there is to know about your iPhone, I recommend getting iCademy,. You just might learn something new.
Speaking of learning new stuff, remember playing Hangman when you were a kid? Parents and teachers like it when kids play games like Hangman because they believe that the game builds vocabularies, or something.
I played it when I got tired of playing Tic Tac Toe. I had to be really bored if I even thought about playing Tic Tac Toe, so that should give you some indication of how often I played Hangman.
Still, I did play the game and was entertained when I did. It’s not a game I look forward to playing. At least, I didn’t use to.
Zynga, the same people you got you hooked on FarmVille, Chess With Friends, and the notoriously addictive Scrabble clone, Words With Friends, now offers up another potential time waster, Hanging With Friends Free.
As you may have surmised by now, Hanging With Friends Free is a Hangman variant designed to fit into Zynga turn-based multiplayer universe. They’ve done a nice job of it too.
Instead of the more gruesome rendering of some poor fellow dangling from a gallows, Hanging With Friends Free has 2 kids hanging on to a bunch of balloons…over a pit of lava. I’m not sure which is the more gruesome, but here you can choose from a short list of avatars that both you and your opponent sees.
The first player creates a word from a list of lettered tiles selected at random. The word can be up to eight characters long. To add a bit of interest, one of the spaces is labeled with either a double or triple letter or word. If you manage to create a word that covers that space then you score points.
Your opponent then tries to guess the word. If he or she guesses correctly he or she survives the round. If he or she doesn’t guess the word then he or she loses a balloon.
Either way it becomes your opponent’s turn to create a word for you to solve. Guess the word and stay afloat. Miss your guess and sink into despair. The game continues until a player loses all balloons and meets Sméagol’s fate (sans His Precious).
What about the points you scored? Well, the more points you have the more Lifelines you can afford. Lifelines give clues that can help you solve the word at hand. You need 200 points to get 20 coins which, in turn, can be spent on a lifeline.
The free version is ad supported, but you can buy an ad-free version for two bucks.
Hanging With Friends Free is yet one more addiction from the software pushers at Zynga. It’s cute. It’s fun. It’s free!
That’s a wrap for this week. More free stuff below with direct links.
