Opening day was Monday, but let’s face it, there’s a lot of downtime in baseball games. Why not stock up on some apps while you’re tailgating this weekend? You can browse for new music and podcasts on your iPhone. Keep up on the MLB stats and news on your iPad. On your Mac, upgrade Command + Tab to include window previews. Find an apartment that saves you time on your daily commute, and even kill hours with a new game that recreates Snake with a twist.
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iPhone/iPod Touch: Soundcloud
If you want to boil the concept of Soundcloud down to a single aspect, it’s Instagram for audio files. You can share files with your friends, but just remember that no one wants to listen to your lunch. You can search for your Facebook friends and follow them, as well as search for artists on the service.
If you’re more interested in creation, you can record and share audio right from the app. This is probably the easiest way to start doing podcasts. There are more than a few podcasts already on the service.
Soundcloud is free and can be downloaded here.
iPad: Race to the Pennant
Baseball season just started, and you’re going to need an app to keep track of standings. You could grab one of those sports network or newspaper apps, but those bring a lot of baggage along with the one thing you want. Race to the Pennant just gives you the standings, box scores, and news headlines in a simple format.
Race to the Pennant has a nice textured design and an intuitive interface. You can slide through the current standings, presented division by division as a bar graph. You can drill down for more info team by team, and get some news headlines that open articles in an in-app browser.
Race to the Pennant is $0.99 and can be downloaded here.
Mac: HyperSwitch
There are some apps that don’t really do more than just tweak an existing utility. In the case of HyperSwitch, it lets you to switch between apps just like Command + Tab but instead of app icons, you see a snapshot of the window that’s open in the app. If you have more than one window open, you will see each separately in the switcher.
The app is in beta, and does have some bugs. If you prefer you can change the settings to add the Windows preview to the normal app switcher, but it seems a bit slower that way.
HyperSwitch is free and you can download it here.
Web: AutoNo
There are a lot of factors to consider when looking for apartments. One that may slip through the cracks is how long it will take you to get to work from your new location. Is it a short drive? Can you catch the bus? AutNo will help you figure out details about your commute from your new house or apartment.
The app has a really nice layout, putting your results on a map, and then showing the route to your job highlighted on the map. You can choose from all of Google Maps transit options. The individual listings show up as a modal window directly on the map. The only real drawback is that it doesn’t include Craigslist results, which is where the majority of apartments are listed these days.
You can check out AutNo here.
Game of the Week: Nimble Quest
If you’re of a certain age, there’s a good chance that you wasted a good chunk of your education playing Snake on a graphing calculator or Nokia phone. Nimblebit, makers of Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, has resurrected the game but with a unique twist: rather than just building a snake, you collect heroes and battle enemies.
It’s a little tricky working out the timing for the battle system, but you can pick it up fairly quickly. You level up heroes by collecting gems as you defeat enemies.
Nimble Quest is free, as in freemium, and you can download it for iPad and iPhone here and the Mac here.
