How to Spend That iTunes Gift Card You Got for the Holidays
Ah, the iTunes gift card: the present that says, “I bought this at Rite Aid an hour ago.”
No, it’s not the most personalized gift. But if you know how to spend it, it could very well improve your iPhone experience in 2015. Below, a brief guide to the best paid apps Apple has to offer.
Games
Heads Up! $1
This app, made popular by Ellen DeGeneres, is the new charades for Millennials. Just find a friend or five, choose an area of specialty (for example, animals or movies), hold your iPhone on your forehead, and your friends will have to act out or describe whatever they see and get you to guess the word. The goal is to guess as many words as possible in under a minute.
It’s a nice ice-breaker, especially after a few drinks. And the best part? It records your friends as they act out the mystery words — meaning you can share the more hilarious rounds with others. If you get obsessed enough, you can also buy in-app bonus categories.
Threes: $2
The day I discovered Threes was probably my lowest point of productivity in history. This puzzle game is addictive and endlessly entertaining. Though it does take a while to get the hang of, it’s not nearly as infuriating as, say, Candy Crush. Use it to waste time on the bus, or while you’re waiting to meet a friend. You won’t be disappointed. 3, 6, 12, 24 …
Monument Valley: $3.99
The beautifully designed Monument Valley is ultra relaxing. Inspired by Japanese prints and the art of M.C. Escher, the game brings you on a Zen-like journey, guiding a princess through her gorgeous fairy-tale land. As you manipulate the environment to aid her, atmospheric audio plays in sync with your actions. Overall, much less upsetting than your average app.
I admire this game for one major reason: Its creators understand that a game doesn’t have to make any sense to be fun. The storyline follows a mysterious fisherman named Billy, who must resolve his troubled past by navigating the deep seas. You do this, of course by first fishing for various creatures deep into the ocean, and then slinging them into the air and blasting them to pieces with a gun. What can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants.
Not a baaaaaad way to spend your money, especially if you’re a goat enthusiast.
Productivity
Workflow: $3
A recent addition to the App Store, this app allows you to establish certain automated paths on your smartphone to make common actions more efficient. In the end you’re able to reduce all the tapping and swiping required to do something and save some serious time. Examples of paths include deleting photos, making GIFs, calculating tips, finding coffee nearby, or hailing a car to your next event. Pretty nifty.
Wolfram Alpha, a 30-year project from computer scientist and former physicist Stephen Wolfram, is a search engine that collects as much public data as possible, curates it, and — with this wealth of info — is able to calculate and answer an endless number of things. It’s all sourced from reliable places, too. This tool is worth having on hand.
OmniFocus 2: $20
OK, OmniFocus 2 is a little pricey, but if you really need a digital personal assistant to whip you into shape, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by this app. The organizational tool lets you schedule tasks by date, person, place, or project. It’s obsessively color-coded, and organized to piece out your time in a thoroughly efficient manner.
Scribe: $3
Mac owners will delight in Scribe, a simple tool that allows you to copy any text, phone number, image, or URL onto your phone and transfer it to your Mac (or vice versa). It takes either a few quick taps on your phone or a keyboard shortcut on your computer to make it happen. Very helpful for filling in where Apple’s new Continuity feature fails.
Camera accessories
Camera+: $3
Your native camera app is fine for quick edit jobs, but if you really want some legs to experiment with a photo, the Camera+ app is a perfect upgrade. You can adjust the colors and lighting of a photo based on the scene you took it in, crop it any number of ways, and slap on pages’ worth of filters and frames. You can also take photos within the app using a feature that allows you to change focus and exposure on your phone’s screen. Your iPhone’s default camera app can do this, but Camera+’s is much easier to use.
Waterlogue: $3
I’ve been a fan of this artsy app since it came out last year. You can use it to make any photo you take look like a super-fancy watercolor painting. And you’d be surprised how good an impressionist vibe makes an otherwise “meh” photo look.
Health
Motion X 24/7 Sleeptracker: $1
Like any fitness app, this one tracks your activity, steps, weight, and sleep. But what puts it ahead of the pack is its ability to measure your heart rate. Yes, you have to have either an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus to use this feature, but if you do, you can place your finger over the lens and flash, and the sensor will measure your pulse for a full 60 seconds. In the end, it’ll register your average number of heartbeats per minute. Not to mention it’s also compatible with HealthKit.
White Noise: $2
Perhaps, like me, you sleep next to an irritable radiator and a talkative cat. This app helps to tune out those annoyances by looping peaceful sounds in the background. You can hook your phone up to a Bluetooth speaker or just simply set it on your bedside table. And if there’s a very particular genre of white noise (for example dryer tumbling) that’s not available in the app’s extensive catalog, you can always create your own recording and loop it into a custom mix. Overall, it’ll prevent you from waking up in the middle of the night and help you get a better night’s sleep.
Entertainment
Star Walk: $3
This Apple Design Award-winning app combines a vast database of astronomical data with gorgeous design to help guide you through a night of stargazing. Just point your phone’s camera up, and it’ll automatically overlay labels for known constellations, planets, and stars in view. It’s pretty amazing technology, not to mention incredibly fun to use for both beginners and seasoned astronomers. But if you want to get intense about it, you could also splurge on the $40 SkySafari Pro 4 (stargazing on crack).
djay 2: $10
Though it works best on your iPad, djay 2 is a super-slick way to sharpen your turntable skills. The latest version of the app, which I wrote about in May, gives you immediate access to all of Spotify’s 20 million-plus songs (as long as you’re a subscriber). It also has a very cool algorithm that automatically suggests songs that would mix well with others. Basically, you can now have a DJ at every party for just a small, one-time fee.
Litz: Free to download, with in-app purchases
This app uses advanced reading techniques to help you read faster and comprehend things better. Though its library is a little limited to required-reading classics, it’s worth trying out. You’ll be surprised how fast reading Little Women goes by the second time around with this technology.
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