Welcome to another week of new apps! This week we get back to what apps do best — making your life just a little bit easier, whether that’s watching YouTube videos or just scrolling through Instagram. Take a look through these wares and see if anything strikes your fancy.
Android
Tuber
YouTube isn’t exactly the most intuitive app to browse all the channels you follow, and that’s why Tuber exists. It puts your subscriptions front and centre so you can be sure to never miss a new video from the YouTube persons you love the most. The app only supports 720p resolution at the moment, so if you happen to watch a video that takes advantage of YouTube’s higher res offerings, you can easily switch to the proper YouTube app in Tuber. [Free]
iOS
Steve Reich’s Clapping Music
American composer Steve Reich created Clapping Music, a song created entirely from clapping, in 1972, and in 2015, he created an app to go with it. The app’s real purpose is to help train your rhythm through gamification of Reich’s famous piece. Different levels will challenge you along the way once you feel you’ve mastered a certain difficulty. I’m going to safely file this under “deceptively addicting.” [Free]
FailPop
Travelling the world is incredibly rewarding, but it can also be a maze of cultural differences and mis-translations that makes you coming off as kind of a dick. FailPop is designed specifically so you avoid accidentally doing something painfully awkward while abroad. Do I shake hands or bow? Do they tip in this country? Etc. Etc. FailPop even comes with a bunch of GIFs to help you avoid being a dumb foreigner. [Free]
Feeday
I check Instagram habitually. At this point, it’s almost an unconscious habit. That’s why Feeday is so interesting to me. The app is essentially a customisable widget for iOS that brings your Instagram straight to your Today Widget on the drop down menu. You can select a 3×1, 3×2, and 3×3 grid to display the latest photos from your feed. It’s only shaves a few seconds of your browsing time, but a few seconds are better than nothing. [Free]
Windows Phone
TwinsOrNot
A few weeks back, Microsoft launched a service called TwinsOrNot that let you search the web for your digital twin, someone in that vast cache of internet photos that shares your visage. Now Microsoft has packed down that online tool into a Windows Phone app so you can wile away your days finding your face mate. [Free]
Video 360
VR isn’t going anywhere. Unlike its 90s incarnation, the 21st century push for computers on our faces seems to be making a lasting impression, and things like Video 360 could be a glimpse at how we consume that content. As the name suggests, Video 360 is a media player that supports 360-degree video playback from YouTube’s 360 degree videos. Neat! [$US2]