Experience a Meaningful Tale in the Puzzling Shards of Memories
January 10, 2017 by RSS Feed
Shards of Memories: an Art Puzzle Adventure ($1.99) by Milos Micakovic is a puzzle game that tells the story of a troubled professor as he goes through one of his most difficult stages of life. If you like philosophical games that have a deep meaning behind them, such as Stay, Mum and Sally’s Law, then you’ll enjoy what Shards of Memories has to offer.
While I love all kinds of games on all platforms, I think the best genre to play on mobile is definitely the puzzle game. These are the ones that make you think and keep your brain stimulated, but are also challenging and sometimes they can tell you a heartfelt story and appeal to your emotions. Plus, they’re the type of game that you can enjoy in short play sessions throughout the day, rather than having to sit down and spend several hours at once to feel like you’ve made any progress. I feel like I’ve gone through almost all of the puzzle games that matter on the App Store, but I can’t help but check out a new release when it hits. I saw Shards of Memories show up on the App Store just this week, and knew that this was a game I had to check out for myself.
Visually speaking, Shards of Memories is a fairly photorealistic game that looks downright gorgeous. The game features a dark and rich wooden texture background that represents a table, and the classic Polaroid-style photographs that represent each stage have a realistic aesthetic. The puzzles themselves also sport pieces of glass that have a frosted texture to them, and everything is complete with cracks once you put them together to fit the object that is the focus of the level you’re on. There are subtle animations in Shards of Memories that you’ll notice when the broken glass is put in its proper place, and the transitions from one puzzle to the next are smooth and seamless. This is important, because each photo tells part of the story behind of the professor, so the conversion from one to the other means everything flows together. Story text is presented in a simple but effective serif typeface that goes well with the overall serious tone of the game. The slow, ambient soundtrack feels rather emotional and the sound effects represents shattered glass well. The developer truly did a great job with Shards of Memories in terms of the graphics and audio, so kudos.
Following traditional puzzle game fashion, Shards of Memories has three chapters and there are about 91 levels total in the entire game, so do get a good amount of game for the price. The goal in each puzzle is rather simple: rearrange all of the broken pieces of glass so that they fit the object that symbolizes that part of the professor’s life at the time shown in the photograph. Each photo will have a line or two of story, and the bigger picture reveals itself over time. However, to make things interesting, Shards of Memories has multiple endings that can unfold, depending on how the player decides to go about playing the game. I’m still pretty early on in the game so I’m not sure how the endings are determined, but this is a great way to keep players coming back even if they beat the game once but still feel emotionally invested in the game.
Controls in Shards of Memories is a simple affair. Each puzzle features a cutout of an object, and several broken pieces of glass. Your job is to get those shards into their proper place in the cutout, and this is done by dragging them where you think they go. If it’s the right spot, it will snap into place. Sometimes pieces will have to be rotated before they can fit in the image properly, and this is done by tapping on it to make it rotate clockwise. Once you think it’s properly upright, drag it onto the board with your finger and see if you can find the spot for it. If you’ve ever played tangram puzzles before, you’ll understand that Shards of Memories is similar to that, and there may be a lot of trial-and-error involved before you figure it out, especially since things get more complicated as you go on.
Besides being a beautiful puzzle game, Shards of Memories is a deep, thought-provoking experience. As you unravel the story behind the professor, you’ll discover that he is fighting anxiety and depression as he is trying to get over a meaningful relationship with someone else. Since we are all adults, I think this is something that we’ve all been through at some point in our lives, and I’m glad to see that it’s being expressed through a game. As players watch the professor learn to deal with the emotional events he’s experiencing, it can also help out people who are going through something similar. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still offers a unique perspective of psychological insights and visual thinking.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m still early on in the game, but so far I’m loving every moment of it. The visuals in Shards of Memories are exquisite, superb, and incredibly realistic, which is fitting considering the nature of the game. The background piano music is soothing to listen to, despite casting a dark tone overall to the game. Sound effects are a nice touch, and the puzzles start off easy enough but do pick up in difficulty as you go, so it’s never too easy. And the multiple endings that you can get give you a good reason to go back and replay the puzzles as you try to get an alternative ending to what you go before. Plus, there are no time limitations or move restrictions, so you play and go through the emotional story at your own pace. Overall, Shards of Memories is a great visual storytelling experience in a puzzle game.
I highly recommend giving Shards of Memories a try if you are looking for a meaningful mobile puzzle game with a fairly relatable, emotional story to go with everything. Shards of Memories is available on the App Store as a universal download for your iPhone and iPad for just $1.99. There are no in-app purchases, so you just pay once and play forever.
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Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 01/10/2017
January 10, 2017 by RSS Feed
PDF Markup Ultimate - Annotate PDFs and Web Pages , Audio spectrum analyzer and dB (decibel) meter , Photo Reminders and more
iPhone:
Modern Labyrinth ( $0.99 → Free ) kevin jego Modern Labyrinth is casual gaming at its best. It doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles. Just launch the game and get rolling. As with all labyrinth games, your job is to avoid falling down the wrong hole on your way to the highlighted one by tilting your iDevice. Try to move quickly and achieve the best time possible. The game includes 36 levels.
Questerium: Sinister Trinity, Collector's Edition (Full) ( $4.99 → Free ) G5 Entertainment A mysterious meteor crash-landed in a small town, and three lifelong friends make the worst decision of their lives by choosing to use it for experiments. When things go wrong, the entire town needs to be evacuated, but two small children have been left behind. It’s up to you as the investigator to not only find the children but also destroy the machine harnessing the power of the meteor and bring the professor to justice. Along the way you’ll have to search 39 locations, hunt for objects in 17 scenes, and solve 21 brain-bending puzzles.iPad:
Questerium: Sinister Trinity, Collector's Edition HD (Full) ( $6.99 → Free ) G5 Entertainment
A mysterious meteor crash-landed in a small town, and three lifelong friends make the worst decision of their lives by choosing to use it for experiments. When things go wrong, the entire town needs to be evacuated, but two small children have been left behind. It’s up to you as the investigator to not only find the children but also destroy the machine harnessing the power of the meteor and bring the professor to justice. Along the way you’ll have to search 39 locations, hunt for objects in 17 scenes, and solve 21 brain-bending puzzles.Universal:
PDF Markup Ultimate - Annotate PDFs and Web Pages ( $9.99 → Free ) Kdan Mobile Software LTD You’re able to import PDFs and photos via your favorite cloud storage services, Wi-Fi, the web, iTunes File Sharing, or from your photo library. You’re also able to capture photos right from within the app and quickly convert them into PDFs. You can then view your PDFs, or edit and add markups using a wide variety of tools including highlighters, freehand pens, sticky notes, text boxes, arrows, and shapes. PDFs can also be searched for in Spotlight with keywords, and organized by date, tag, or name.
Audio spectrum analyzer and dB (decibel) meter ( $3.99 → Free ) Elena Polyanskaya With Spectrum Analyzer, you can find out if the environment you’re in has eardrum rupturing sound or is quiet as a whisper. The app is loaded with handy features including the ability to see maximum and minimum audio levels, multiple FFT sizes, three octaves, line and bar graphs, the ability to pause the graph, full screen mode, and so much more.
Photo Reminders ( $0.99 → Free ) uladzislau yasnitski It’s so much easier to recall important events and ideas when you can actually see them, which is why we’re recommending Photo Reminders. All you have to do is snap a photo of something related to the event or idea you want to recall later, and then add a title and note. The photo will be turned into a large thumbnail, which can easily be viewed, edited, and shared from the main screen. Additionally, Photo Reminders allows you to attach audio notes and alerts to all of your events and ideas.Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free
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With the Pennies app, every cent counts in your budget
January 09, 2017 by RSS Feed
Pennies – Personal Money, Budget & Finance Manager ($1.99) by Magnetic Zero is a simplistic app that wants to help you keep track of where your money goes. If you liked apps like Next and Clara, then Pennies should be right up your alley.
Oh, budgeting — it’s a tedious thing to do, but it’s something we all need to do because not all of us are rich. While it’s nice to have a lot of disposable income, sometimes we just have to plan out how we spend our money so that it can last us a long time. I haven’t been that good with budgeting myself, but I’ve been trying to do better with Mint, my personal finance app of choice at the moment. But of course, I’m always searching for new apps to try out, so when I stumbled upon Pennies on the App Store this week, I had to give it a shot.
Pennies has a minimal design, but it still looks elegant and beautiful. The app makes use of light, pastel colors (green, red, blue) to indicate how you are doing with your budgets for the indicated time period, so you can get an idea with just a single glance. The sans-serif typography that is used is also incredibly legible and easy to look at, regardless of the small or large size. It’s also fast and responsive, so navigating around the app is a breeze.
On the first launch of Pennies, it will ask you to set up your budget. There are three options for this: monthly, weekly, or one-off budget. If you are not familiar with a one-off budget, it will never repeat and is for a set time period. The next step will be to select the start date, which can be today, a certain day of the week, the first or last of the month, or a specific day of the month (this all depends on your type of budget). Then you pick the currency, budget amount, money left, give it a name, and ta-da, your new budget is set up.
If you created multiple budgets, you can scroll through them one-by-one by swiping horizontally on the main screen. Swiping vertically reveals the total remaining amount for the budget and how much left for today. To add a new expense on a budget, tap on the “+” button. This brings up a keypad input, and bar graphs at the top make sure you are aware of how much you have left, so you will never be left wondering. Once you have the value entered, just tap on the checkmark and it’s saved — if you change your mind, just tap on the “x.”
Going back to the main screen, a tap on the “hamburger” button will bring up a list of expenses for the selected budget in chronological order. You can swipe on items here to delete them, but unfortunately, you can’t edit them. Hopefully the developer can change that in the future.
Tapping on the budget button in the top right corner of the screen will bring up your budgets, and you can add new ones as needed, make changes to existing ones, or delete them. You can access the app’s settings by double-tapping anywhere on the screens — a little weird, but it works. Pennies has toggles for sounds and reminders, in case you need some nudging to keep you on track.
Pennies is a simple budget tracker, and is great for anyone who needs a little push when it comes to managing their money. I love the plainness of the app since it’s intuitive enough for anyone to use it from the get-go. However, it could still use some improvements to make it even better. A big one that’s missing is sync — I would need a way to get my data out of the app if necessary, so it would be nice to have either iCloud or Dropbox for that. It also should let users be able to edit their expenses in case a small typo was made, rather than requiring you to delete and add it again.
The developer has also promised some bonuses in future updates, including synced budgets with friends, family, and partners, as well as a spending wizard in case you need help figuring out how much you should be setting aside for everything. And to make it more fun to use, sound packs and rewards are on their way.
At the moment, I’m not into manually keeping track of my money — that’s why I use Mint — but if you are able to discipline yourself to do it regularly, then Pennies is a good option on the market.
I recommend checking out Pennies for yourself if you need a manual budget tracker to help you manage your money. You can find it on the App Store on the iPhone for $1.99.
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Restore Peace in Star Knight, An Action-Packed Platformer
January 09, 2017 by RSS Feed
Star Knight ($0.99) by JungSang You is an action platformer game that will give you a real challenge. If you grew up with platformer games and want a real gem to add to your collection, then Star Knight is worth a look. It joins the ranks of other fine platformer games like Le Parker: Sous Chef Extraordinaire and Goblin Sword.
As someone who grew up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I have many fond memories of platformer games in general because that’s mostly what I played as a child. Even though I never considered myself to be one of the best platform gamers out there (I can’t do speed runs), I always enjoyed the genre because it was just fun and was a good test of my basic hand-eye coordination and reflexes. Even though I don’t consider many platformers on iOS to be great due to the controls (physical buttons will always reign supreme), with a few exceptions like the Mikey Shorts games, I am still eager to check them out when there’s a new release. When I happened to come across Star Knight (no, not the overpowered Star Knight armor in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate) on the App Store, I was intrigued because of the screenshots and the game itself looked incredibly fun. After spending some time with it, I’m not disappointed.
Visually, Star Knight is gorgeous, and one of the main reasons I decided to check the game out in the first place. It features a beautifully minimalistic aesthetic that will appeal to plenty of people, and personally, I find it to be like a mashup of Limbo and Alto’s Adventure, due to the soothingly colored backdrops but dark silhouettes in the foreground. The game retains a 2-D perspective, but due to the background, you get a nice bit of depth, and the vignette effect makes everything in the center pop a bit more. The character sprites are rendered nicely, as they sport a kind of “chibi” look to them. The enemies all have their own distinctive appearance and it is easy to tell them apart from each other, especially as you find yourself in new areas in later chapters. Animations are fairly smooth and fluid in the game, though it does feel like the attacking motion is a bit laggy at times. The game also has a whimsical and captivating atmospheric soundtrack that is a joy to listen to in the background, and sets the mood well. Overall, the developer did a good job with the graphics and audio of Star Knight, and it’s a good reason to dive into the game, even if you had no interest before.
Falling in the footsteps of other platformer games before it, Star Knight is level-based, and players will find five chapters available, though the later ones have to be unlocked chronologically. Each section has about 12 stages to get through, so you get a good amount of content for your buck. Up to three stars can be earned on each level as well, in case you want to be a perfectionist and go back and replay them to get a perfect ranking. Players have the opportunity to acquire coins in the game that can be spent on purchasing better weapon upgrades for their character, and there are runes that can be collected to unlock powerful skills to aid you in battle. Replay value is fairly high if you want to perfect and collect everything.
The story of Star Knight involves the peaceful planet of Gaon that is now under attack, and Dark Dragon Nidhogg took away the sun. It is now up to Naro, the Star Knight himself, to overcome all of the challenges that await him and bring back peace to Gaon.
Controls in Star Knight are fairly simple and intuitive, though the button placements are also customizable in case you don’t like the default positioning. In the bottom left corner will be two directional buttons for moving left and right. In the bottom right corner will be the other two buttons, which are used for jumping and attacking. I found the positioning for attacking and jumping to be a tad off for my liking, so I moved them so that they are next to each other instead of in a quarter-circle formation. Once the buttons were in the right spot for me, it was easy to get used to the controls and it’s pretty responsive to touch. I did feel that attacking had a bit of lag between slashes when you tap the button rapidly though, so maybe that can be optimized in the future.
As you make progress in the game, you’ll want to access the shop to check out better swords that you can purchase with those shiny coins and make sure to equip them before going into a stage. You start off with the basic wooden sword, but you can get elemental swords and even ones with magical properties later on. The more expensive a sword is, the more damage it will do, respectively. On top of getting coins and gems, you’ll want to keep an eye out for those runes that are hidden somewhere on each stage. When you collect enough of these, you’ll be able to unlock a new skill and equip it (up to three at a time) to make it easier to overcome your foes. While I think it’s pretty easy to grind for the coins, there are in-app purchases for coins if you are feeling impatient.
I’ve only just started Star Knight, but I’m finding it to be rather enjoyable so far. The game looks exquisite with the contrasting colors and silhouettes, the music is delightful, the controls are nice and customizable, and the game is definitely challenging the further you get. While it starts off easy enough, be prepared to die quite a few times later on, and the game makes sure you know how many times you’ve failed as well, since it keeps count. Fortunately, there are checkpoints so you can start from the last checkpoint if you die, which is always nice. Regardless, Star Knight is a great addition to the action platformer genre.
I highly recommend giving Star Knight a try if you are in the mood for a challenging action platformer game where you can hack-n-slash your way through minions of darkness. You can find Star Knight on the App Store as a universal app for your iPhone and iPad for just $0.99. There are in-app purchases for more coins.
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How to Open Recently Closed Tabs in Safari on iPhone or iPad
January 09, 2017 by RSS Feed
Many of us use Safari on our iPhones to browse the web, watch videos and stay on top of the latest news. It is a feature-rich browser that offers most of the essential features that a normal user would need.
There are times that you accidentally close a tab in Safari or you want to check something from a webpage that was closed recently. Luckily, Safari offers a handy feature that allows you to view and open the tabs that you recently closed. Using it is pretty simple once you know where to find it.
How to Open Recently Closed Tabs in Safari on iPhone
Step 1: Open the Safari app on your iPhone.
Step 2: Press the tabs icon located in the bottom right corner.
Step 3: Tap and hold on the + button.
Step 4: A list of all your recently closed tabs will be displayed. To open a specific webpage, simply tap on it.
How to Open Recently Closed Tabs in Safari on iPad
Step 1: Launch Safari on your iPad.
Step 2: On the top right corner of the app, you’ll find a + button for opening a new tab. Tap and hold on it.
Step 3: You’ll see a list of all the tabs that were closed recently. Tap on any one of the tabs that you want to open.
That’s all you need to do to view your recently closed tabs and re-open them if needed. Pretty simple right? Keep in mind that if you close Safari from the App Switcher, the list of recently closed tabs will be cleared.
Now that you’ve learned this, you may want to check out other interesting tips for Safari:
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