The Verge - Best New Apps

Best New Apps: Drafts 3.0 for iOS

2013-05-01T19:35:08Z

Drafts is the starting place for anything you might tap out on your iPhone or iPad, integrated with a large and growing number of other apps. This is a notebook that works like an Alfred-style launcher, and as with launchers, the more time you spend with Drafts, the more uses you'll find for it. Launch Drafts and type something — then tweet it, post it to Facebook, send it as an email, or add it to your calendar or Reminders app all from the same place. It can be saved to Dropbox or Evernote, or sent to to-do managers like OmniFocus, Things, and Clear. Custom URL schemes let Drafts integrate with still more apps; I use one to send new events to Fantastical.

A recent 3.0 update adds powerful new management features, including new archive and favoriting options for your notes, and a way to separate your most-used actions into tabs. It also brings tighter integration with Evernote, letting you set up templates for new notes with pre-filled notebook and tag information. If you jot down notes only occasionally, and use stock system apps for most of your needs, Drafts is probably overkill. But if you want to put your text notes to work for you, Drafts is an excellent place to start.

Drafts for iPhone ($2.99) and iPad ($3.99)

Best New Apps: 'Badland' for iOS

2013-04-09T18:30:04Z

The best movies convince you that you know exactly what's about to happen, only to spin off in a direction you never saw coming. Badland is that feeling, unceasing, incarnate in an impressively long and involved iOS game. A sort of demented, Tim Burton-ized version of Jetpack Joyride or Super Meat Boy, Badland has but one control — you tap the screen to make your amorphous, squishy black blob lurch upward, and when you let go it floats back to earth. But the dystopian rainforest through which you're flying is dangerous and ever-changing, with whirring saw blades appearing as unexpectedly as the falling stalactites. Some things you must surmount, others you must weave through at exactly the right moment — you're a living Rube Goldberg machine trying to solve the world.

Your only goal? Survive. And you won't, most of the time. There are side missions, and plenty of aids along your way that provide glimmers of hope, but your only hope is to plan three steps ahead, time everything perfectly, and hope that rock above you is sturdier than it looks.

$3.99, iOS

Best new apps: Ridiculous Fishing for iOS

2013-03-22T15:00:02Z

What is so satisfying about upgrading gear and unlocking levels? Why does acquiring the chainsaw lure keep me up at night? Super Crate Box developer Vlambeer has mastered addictive gameplay, and its latest title is a testament to that. In Ridiculous Fishing, you are a fisherman searching for redemption, mindlessly casting your line deeper to catch eels, catfish, and footstaches — and then using a variety of high-caliber weaponry to shoot them out of the air above your boat.

The game is filled with odd humor, exotic locales to unlock, leaderboards to compare high scores with friends, and a Pokedex-sized catalog of fish to catch. Some fish are so rare they might only come out at night, or others only while you’re wearing certain hats. Once your $2.99 is up and spent, and you’ve devoted hours to catching every last fish, you might breathe a sigh of relief. Your time with Ridiculous Fishing has ended, but you’ll always remember the lessons you learned along the way…. like to never shock a bonefish with a toaster oven.

$2.99 for iOS

Best New Apps: DashClock Widget

2013-03-13T17:00:06Z

DashClock Widget is a new widget for Android 4.2 devices that can be placed on a user’s home screen or lock screen. Developed by a Google employee, DashClock provides quick, glance-able information on your device without requiring you to even unlock it. You can see current weather, numbers of unread emails and text messages, upcoming appointments, and more. And since DashClock supports extensions, third-party app developers can tap into it to show you things like battery status, social notifications, and whatever else they feel like cooking up (we’re using a third-party extension to show battery status in our image below). DashClock also gives you some basic options for appearance of the time and date, and you can choose which order the notifications appear in the list. We’ve been looking for the perfect lock screen widget ever since Android 4.2 was announced last year, and we think DashClock Widget might just be it. The only question is, how long will it take Google to just build this in to Android by default?

Free in the Google Play Store

Best New Apps: Traktor DJ for iPad

2013-03-07T21:05:42Z

Traktor DJ is one of those apps that sells the entire idea of the iPad itself — it takes the fundamentals of complicated, expensive PC-based DJ programs like Traktor Pro and Serato Scratch Live and reduces them to a handful of simple touch gestures that are ridiculously easy to understand. Instead of a virtual turntable or other strained metaphor, you just tap, swipe, and drum on the waveforms of your tracks directly — Traktor is smart enough to slice up the beats, sync things up, and even suggest other songs from your iTunes library that’ll work well in your set. All you have to do is play.

DJ purists will scoff at this — Traktor DJ automates skills that take years to learn using turntables or CDJs. But the rest of us don’t have to worry about that stuff. We’ll be busy making music — and reclaiming all that space in the bedroom where the 1200s used to sit.

$19.99 for iOS

Best New Apps: Pocket Casts for Android

2013-02-27T19:00:03Z

I'd been waiting for a great Android podcast app for a long time, and one has finally arrived. With RSS readers and Twitter clients that match the thoughtful design of their iOS counterparts, the Play Store has started to host quality as well as its undeniable quantity of software — but until now, there's never been a podcast app that wasn't ugly, a pain to use, or both. Pocket Casts is the unlikely savior: it used to be pretty terrible itself, with an awkward interface ported straight from iOS. But the app has been completely overhauled for its new version 4, and the results are fantastic.

The UI is attractive, simple, and Android-native; while it has a distinct style, it looks like it was designed for the platform, and just about everything works the way you'd expect across both phones and tablets. The effortless cross-device podcast syncing is a killer feature, too, especially as it'll be compatible with iOS once that app gets its own update. I'm not sure why Android never had a quality podcast app until now, but at least it was worth the wait — Pocket Casts is the best I've used on any mobile platform.

$3.99 on Android

Best New Apps: Sunrise

2013-02-21T20:09:04Z

If it's not in my calendar, I have exactly zero chance of remembering to do something or be somewhere. The biggest problem with that is "my calendar" lives in so many different places now. I have a work calendar, and a personal calendar; sometimes I only get invited to things on Facebook. Not only does Sunrise bring all that data into one great-looking app, it adds everything else I might need for the day, like the weather and whose birthday it is. The app also lets you do stuff with all that information: I can post "Happy Birthday" on my friend's Facebook in two taps, email everyone who's coming to my meeting this afternoon, and even jump straight to Google Maps to get directions to the restaurant where I'm having dinner. All without ever having to leave the app. I've only been using Sunrise for three days, and I already trust it with my life — if I forget anything now, I don't think I can blame my calendar anymore.

Free on iOS