Reiner Knizia’s City of Secrets Pipes (what a mouthful that title is) takes off from this basic premise and adds some twists and tweaks to the formula to make the game new and interesting. There is no race against the clock in this game, no oozing liquid threatening to ruin your mood. You simply connect a network of pipes together, going from the source in the middle to the outer connections, using the randomly-drawn pipe that is given to you each turn. Think “Waterworks” meets “Tetris” and you’re starting to get somewhere. Each outer connection has  a point value associated with it, and you can score multipliers based on whether you connected with fat or thin pipe, and whether you have an unbroken line of fat pipes leading back to the source.

Pros and Cons

The graphics and appearance of the game are stellar, giving you the feeling that you’re repairing some arcane steampunk-inspired airship. There is no story to speak of, which is just fine considering that this is a puzzle game, but the attention to detail in the graphic and sound departments is fantastic.

You progress through the levels and earn stars based on your performance. You earn points for matching your network of pipes to the borders, and lose points for dropping a pipe where it doesn’t belong. The game helpfully highlights on the board where a pipe can be placed in its particular orientation, but if you choose (or are forced) to place a pipe where it doesn’t go, it becomes a “stopper” and costs you a penalty.

The game has tons of levels and offers a lot of gameplay value for the money, but it would be nice if the basic formula of connecting pipes together was turned on its head every once in a while, or if there were some kind of “power-up” or special pipes that had different properties. You can only connect so many pipes together before you start to wonder what it’s all really for.

Overall

Reiner Knizia’s City of Secrets Pipes is a great, inexpensive puzzle game from one a game design legend. It takes a familiar formula and gives it a little twist that makes it fun and engaging over dozens of levels, though it did wear out its welcome a bit for this reviewer. It’s currently on sale for only $0.99 and is available as a Universal app for iPhone and iPad.

How It Works

If you took my advice and thought about Twitter for voice, then you’re pretty much up to speed on how the service works. The app itself features everything you would expect: a stream of feeds from those people you follow, a “discovery” tab where you can find new users to follow, a feed that shows what people are following you and what they’re saying, and a profile page where you can edit and fine-tune your online persona.

Adding a new post is as simple as tapping the giant “+” button in the middle of the bottom toolbar. You can type text and/or record your voice, and then send it out into the wilds to be ignored or praised. The service has been active for a while overseas and has a huge stable of users already, including many celebrities with hundreds of thousands of followers, though for the time being you’ll be hard-pressed to find any of the voices speaking much English.

You can post just to Bubbly and easily share your posts on Twitter and Facebook. The app also lets you search your Twitter and Facebook feeds for other Bubbly users. The service and app are both free, though to get unlimited access to the entire “catalog” of celebrity feeds you need to pay an unlock fee of $2.99.

Pros and Cons

Bubbly feels like a polished and streamlined service, which is expected since this isn’t a cold launch from nothing: it’s been in use for some time overseas. The app is stable and slick, and navigating the features is easy and intuitive. If you’re familiar with social networks then I expect you will be able to find anything you’re looking for: followers, feeds, streams, activity around your profile, putting your own profile picture up. It’s all available right within the app. In fact, I don’t think there is even a website-based version of the service, it’s used entirely within the app.

The business model is unique, since there are no advertisements (currently) within the app. It’s free to use, but you have to pay to see all of the celebrity feeds. I don’t know what the criteria is as to who is enough of a celebrity to warrant being behind the locked gate, but it’s clear within the app who you can follow and who you can’t. Time (and the users) will tell if this model of un-lockable content is something Western users will flock to.

Although I couldn’t understand most of what I listened to in the few feeds that I tried out, I recognize how unique and addictive it can be to hear your favorite celebrity talking, instead of reading some 140-character spew of nonsense that they had their publicist or teenage intern type. When it’s their voice, you know you’re connected to them, even for that brief span of 10-40 seconds or so. Comics can make a quick funny while stuck in traffic, musicians can record and distribute a sample of a show they played the night before. The possibilities of using your own recordings and posting them as a social feed are endless and limited only by your imagination.

Overall

Bubbly is a fun and active social network that takes the idea of sharing your thoughts to the next obvious level, your voice. Whether that appeals to you or not is an entirely personal decision, but I suspect there are some out there who are just dying to let the world hear their deepest, most private inner thoughts… or their most offensive inappropriate humor. It’s a mixed bag or possibilities.

Rather than just take a pen and paper diary and create a digital version of it, Feel Better attempts to use all of the advantages that the iOS platform has to offer to give you more than a simple “diary” experience. Using your mood and adding photos, videos, music, and tagging, you can create a dynamic slideshow from all of the elements in your entries for something truly unique and different that can’t be done in any other medium.

How It Works

You start by selecting a mood using a combination of a mood slider and some icons. Slide the mood slider between the frowny face and the happy face, and this will activate a series of icons that represent different emotions. You can drag your finger around the screen to see what each icon means, then select one and enter a few words to describe how you’re feeling. You can then tap the paper clip icon to bring out the attachment toolbar, where you’ll find tags, pictures, videos, and music that you can add to your mood entry.

You can view all of your entries on the calendar screen, and create a slideshow that searches the database of entries for specific tags and generates a slideshow based on the pictures, music, and text in those entries.

You can also post your emotional states on Facebook, create Self Help movies that highlight your positive emotions rather than a catch-all of every emotion, and save and export your movies to YouTube. Reportedly coming soon are charts and maps of your emotional states.

Pros And Cons

Feel Better is a diary-type app that takes the idea of tracking your moods and emotions and supercharges it by taking advantage of the unique abilities of a handheld smartphone platform. By including photos, videos, and music you can capture so much more of every moment than just what a simple emotional icon can convey. The tagging feature comes into play with the slideshows, which is a great way to visualize your mood across many different days and events.

Charts and maps will be a welcome addition to the different ways the app currently features for visualizing your emotions.

Overall

Feel Better is a fantastic app for tracking your moods and so much more. Using multimedia elements and your own tags you can easily create amazing slideshows from your own experiences and save them to your device. It’s a great journaling app that should be tried by anyone who is into tracking your experiences on your device.

How It Works

The app has four different modes:

• Coloring – You can free-draw on a blank page, or fill-in one of over 100 different cute animal outlines. Drawings can be saved to the device’s camera roll.
• Matching – You must pick the animal that matches the mystery outline above. After matching the name of the animal is said out loud.
• Letters – Drag the letters to spell the name of the pictured animal. There is a mix of short and long animal names.
• Scratch & Fill – Simply drag around the outline picture of the animal to fill in the proper colors.

Out of all of the above activities, Scratch & Fill obviously has the least “educational” value, but is most likely intended for the younger set of toddlers that  aren’t yet ready for freestyle coloring or spelling yet.

Pros And Cons

Animals has fun, engaging animal drawings that show a lot of personality while maintaining enough of the actual animal’s characteristics to make it recognizable. A nice addition to the game’s educational value would be to include some authentic animal sounds for as many of the creatures as possible. The voice-over work is done well, and is very clear and understandable while still being open and engaging to the young reader.

I liked all of the activities overall, with the letter matching being the best. A more advanced letter matching mode would be a nice option: remove the letter assignments from the blank spaces in the animal’s name, and just leaving empty boxes so you have an indication how many letters you need to spell it. This way you must arrange the “BAT” letters in the right order by using your memory of the word and the phonetics of the letters.

Overall

Animals is a great set of activities for young children of all ages, though toddlers in the range of 3-5 will probably get the most “value” out of it. The free-hand drawing would be good for even older children, and the scratch & fill would be good for those on the younger side. Overall it’s a great app that should give your child lots of fun, interactive educational value.

How It Works

There is a quick tutorial in the app, but the basic flow of work is fairly simple. You first choose a vehicle, including the model year, from the large set included in the app. Not every make and model is represented, but there is a fair approximation of many classic and even modern cars that will probably suit the needs of most people. Maybe my 2005 Saturn Vue isn’t included, but a small SUV of about that size was and it would work fine for my purposes. There are even boats and planes, if you happen to roll that way.

You can paint the entire vehicle in just a few taps by choosing a color and then tapping the picture. You then use the Shape Tool to draw lines that bound off areas to paint in another color. The Shape Tool is similar to what you would find in a desktop drawing application: there are handles for the ends where you can stretch and re-position the lines, plus curve handles that let you stretch and bend them to fit custom features of the vehicle. Once your custom shape is defined you can choose another paint color and tap anywhere in the new space. The app will only paint areas that are bounded  by the drawing of the vehicle, so you don’t have to worry about coloring “outside the lines”.

Once you have a paint job you like, you can upgrade the free app to allow the ability to save your work and share it with others, sending them a schematic of your paint job that includes the proper Dupont colors for refernce.

Pros And Cons

Digital Car Paint is a great app that does one thing and does it well: it lets you create and share a custom car paint job scheme. Every tool in the toolbox is designed to the goal of letting you work quickly and efficiently, and for the most part it succeeds every step of the way. The developers obviously have great understanding of the subject and care very deeply about giving their users a product that will suit their needs.

What I really love about the app is that it has a pricing structure that makes sense: it’s 100% free to use, then charges you to unlock the ability to save your work or share your custom drawing with others. This means that it’s a no-risk trial for anyone curious whether or not the app is right for them, and demonstrates confidence on the part of the developers that the app’s quality speaks for itself. So many niche apps like try to charge people up front for a bug-ridden amateurish experience, but Digital Car Paint’s developers have done it right.

The Shape Tool can be a bit tricky to use, but the model of using handles and curves to define precise lines is the best method for making the most precise shapes possible. It just takes practice, that’s all. It might be nice in a future version of a sort of “freehand” mode was available: this would obviously yield less precise results, but for simple shapes and custom jobs might be “good enough” for most purposes.

Overall

Digital Car Paint is a terrific app that excels at what it was designed to do. If you want to play around it’s free to try, and if you design a paint job for your vehicle that you really like you can drop the $1.99 and save and share your work.

How It Works

I found ToucHotel has everything I would expect in an app that specializes in booking hotels: it has photos of the hotel, including the rooms and the amenities. It has the ability to search over any given set of dates and specify how many people are staying in the room (though it doesn’t seem to allow you to specify ages of children, or even that you have children in your party). Once you find a hotel and tap on it for more information, it shows you the rates for all of the different types of rooms available for those chosen dates. You can also book from right within the app, and there are no booking fees. You can view all of your past bookings on one screen.

The best part of the app is that, if you’ve included your Facebook information, you can view all of your friends’ reviews on the hotels listed. The app also makes it easy to post a request for recommendations onto your Facebook profile, so that others can suggest places to stay. The Friends screen in the app shows how many friends currently use the app and lets you view their favorite hotels.

Pros and Cons

The interface and experience for ToucHotel is smooth and easy to navigate, which is the most important thing for a hotel booking app. Going from the need for a booking to a completed reservation takes only minutes, since the app lets you filter search results by star rating, or amenities offered (i.e. do you only want to see 4-star places that offer WiFi?). Once you’ve booked a reservation within the app, you are all set. If you’re nervous about sharing financial info through a strange app from the iTunes App Store, just be sure you use a major credit card for piece of mind: they will back you up if anything goes wrong with the reservation, just like if you were to book through Expedia or Travelocity.

Overall

ToucHotel is a full-featured hotel search and booking app that has thousands of hotels to choose from, and adds the social element by letting you view your Facebook friends’ hotel reviews. It’s free to download and free to use the service to book hotel rooms, and is available now for iPhone and iPad.

How It Works

You can use the app with or without your Facebook info, just simply use it as a guest. Your trip info is supposed to carry over if you later decide to include your Facebook credentials. Trip To Worlds pulls your Facebook info down and maps all of your friends with push pins on a map of the world. There is a map view and also a summary view, that lists the countries of the world and how many friends you have in each. Same information presented two different ways.

You can also use the app as a sort of trip tracker, by creating “tours” that you’ve been on. Enter the start and end destinations, the dates and distance traveled, and include a photo that is representative of your journey. You can even color-code each trip and view them all on a map. The app organizes trips into “tours”, and by adding a trip to a tour it automatically picks up where the last tour left off. For instance, in my fake tour I went from the U.S. to Sudan until April 17, then when I added another trip to that same tour it started in Sudan on April 17 and prompted me to enter the destination and end date.

Trip To Worlds also tracks your overall distance traveled and overlays it on the travel map.

Pros And Cons

Trip To Worlds overall is a great app, that with a few improvements could be really fun to use.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the Facebook friend information as it is presented on the map and summary screens is fun to look at, but is not really interactive in any way. The map view is the most visually striking, showing all of your friends splayed out (hopefully) all over the globe, with dashed lines from your location giving it the look and feel of an old-fashioned airline route map.

The problem with the map view is that you pretty much just look at it: tapping on the pins shows you how many friends you have in that location, then another tap takes you to a list of the friends there. So far so good, but it would be nice to have some more information besides just their name and where they are. How about how far away that city or country is? Maybe a check-box so that I can indicate that I’ve been there, and then the app can add that distance traveled to the total?

The summary screen shows countries and how many friends are in each country… and that’s it. There is no button to click and be able to see who lives there. For instance I apparently have a friend in Beijing, but to find out who that I have to back out to the map and go hunting for them.

The tours and trips are fun to create, letting you chart your journeys across the globe. Color-coding each country on the tour is a great idea, but the next logical step would be to show on the map the direction your travels went. An example would be my mythical trip from U.S. to Sudan to Albania. There is no way to tell from the map screen in which order the countries were visited, other than by tapping on them and reading the dates. There is a summary screen that lists the countries visited in order, but although the notes for the trip are included on the summary screen you have to tap each trip’s entry to see what countries were visited… why not show the dates traveled and countries visited on the summary screen and make us tap to see the notes? That’s the typical way you do it in an iPhone app, let’s not reinvent the user interface traditions.

Overall

Trip To Worlds is a great app for visualizing your own travels around the world and the locations of all of your Facebook family and friends. It has a few rough edges and plenty of room for improvement (and can we please have an option for distance traveled in miles and not just kilometers?), but as it stands now is a flawed diamond in the rough.

How It Works

Setting up a call is as simple as creating a new conference, then adding participants from the contact list. The app will prompt you to send them a group text inviting them to the conference, including the scheduled start and end times and the conference code for them to join. Callers do not need the app to join a conference (the service will call them at the appointed time), since there will be a call-in number and conference code in the text message for them to join if they miss the initial call. You can also create a conference with participants and then manually start the conference immediately, letting the service call all of the participants and conferencing them in right away. With a paid subscription you can simply one-touch to call people using the app.

You have the choice, if you are using the app to join a conference, between using cellular minutes for the call or using your WiFi for the voice connection. The more astute reader may have deduced that if they have an iPod touch and a microphone, they can use this app to place phone calls for free. This would be a correct deduction, as would be the theory that this app turns all of the off-contract and off-service iPhones you have laying around the house into voice communication devices once again.

The Settings tab includes many features like music on hold, recording of calls, caller announcements, and more. There is also a conference dashboard for live calls where you can manage individual callers (place them on hold, drop them entirely, etc.).

Pros And Cons

Callvine has a great app and service here, especially for the price tag of Free. I tested the HD calling quality and it was superb on my iPhone 4, though there was a slight delay between myself and the other party (who was on a standard cellular connection). If we hadn’t been standing in the same room, it’s doubtful that we would even have known there was a delay in the first place.

Setting up and scheduling a conference call is easy, and free for up to 10 people. The group text messaging invite function is nice, though an email option would be welcome (my off-service iPhone 4 was not able to send the text message, so I had to manually paste the info into an email). The other features are rock-solid and work well, and there is a great option to set the threshold for number of callers before the conference actually “begins”.

I’m frankly amazed at how many features and how much functionality the developers have managed to cram into this little app, considering how much back-end support must be needed for managing the calls themselves as well as the internet-enabled telephony. The overall service and functionality provided by this app is stupendous, and provides a cheap and easy way to create a conference call for people at a moment’s notice.

Overall

Callvine’s HD Voice Conferencing is a stellar conferencing app that includes most major features that you would want in a conference calling service, and for a nominal monthly free can handle all of your conference and telephony needs.

How It Works

The game itself is simple to learn, but with each level of difficulty comes a new challenge. On the Earth levels you simply guide the ball through tilting your device to the cup at the bottom of the maze. There are moving and rotating obstacles as well as bouncy pinball-like bumpers and goal cups of varying sizes. After you complete Earth, you go to the Moon.

The Moon mazes are mostly identical, with the small addition of “holes” in the sides and bottom where your ball can disappear and get lost. The gravity on the Moon is of course lighter, causing the ball to float around and require much more finer control than on the Earth levels.

Jupiter is even more tricky, with a force of gravity that causes your ball to smack almost instantly in any direction you tilt your device. In some ways it’s easier than having low gravity, at least until you overshoot the cup and have to tilt the ball back upwards again.

There is also a section accessible from the main menu featuring videos about science-related topics, such as creating a panda habitat or a piece on machines that can see inside the human body, all produced and provided by Siemens AG.

Pros And Cons

Gravity Force is a fun, simple game that has a back-door lesson on the different levels of gravity you might experience on heavenly bodies besides our own. It’s a good visceral representation of what it might be look to experience gravity somewhere else that goes beyond a simple “you’d be heavier on Jupiter”. The levels are short, with only 9 mazes per “planet”, but that’s just enough to present a fun challenge without being overly difficult or frustrating.

The videos within the app are short and interesting, though one that I viewed had music that was so loud it was hard to hear the narration. Besides the videos linked within the app itself is a link to a mobile site featuring science lessons centered around Disney’s Epcot Center, also as a partnership with Siemens.

Overall

The entire app is a fun, informative, and educational experience that starts with the game itself and continues onto the internet and into real life, with the science videos about Epcot Center. Gravity Force is not a chart-topping gaming experience, but it is not intended to be, and serves its role well as an educational game that follows-through with real science behind our everyday experiences.

How It Works

I won’t pretend to understand how the SRS audio enhancement itself actually works, but the app itself is fairly easy to use. For the most part it is arranged like an alternative music interface to the built-in iPod app. You can browse your music by songs, artists, genres, etc. Once you select something to play you can then get into the enhancement of the music itself.

Not only can you adjust the music using a 3- or 10-band EQ, which functions as expected, but you really get to the nuts and bolts of the app when you activate the WOW HD sound enhancement. After selecting your listening device (headphones, speakers, car stereo, or internal device speakers), you then get the full benefit of the WOW HD processing. There is a simple and advanced mode, though I found the simple mode with default settings worked well to enhance the sound.

The advanced WOW HD mode lets you see and adjust the factors that go into the enhancement itself: Vocal, Space, TruBass, and Definition. Unless you really know what these terms mean you should probably not go anywhere near the advanced screen, but playing around with the faders can give you an idea of what these options control.

Other features in the app include a handy driving skin with larger buttons and display, a volume normalize function that is a godsend, a set of DJ transitions (and playlist modes that selects songs based on their analyzed BPM) that transition randomly between songs and keep the party music lively, and the ability to speed up and slow down podcasts and audiobooks without compromising the tone of the voices. It even has a Workout playlist mode where you can enter your target heart rate and let the app pick the songs to get you going.

Pros And Cons

Even without the WOW HD enhancement from SRS Labs, the DJ transitions and intelligent themed playlists make this app worth the price of upgrading alone. Select something like “mingle then rise” and let your iPhone keep the music slow and steady at the start, then ramp up the BPM as the night wears on.

As far as the audio enhancement goes, WOW HD certainly made the tracks that I played sound richer, fuller, and more connected to the little tiny stage inside my iPhone on which I imagine every artist playing. I’m not sure exactly what voodoo SRS Labs is up to that goes beyond simple EQ adjustments, but the faders that claim to control vocals and space adjustment do work, and create greater sound quality in the songs that I tested. I imagine your mileage may vary depending on what type of music you listen to and how well it’s been mixed and compressed before being dropped onto your device.

Overall

MyTunes Pro is a great overall sound-enhancement and music playback suite, that includes more than just the magic pixie dust that SRS Labs sprinkles onto the ones and zeroes in your mp3 library. The app is free to try out and includes 10 minutes per day of audio enhancement and general goofing around and testing, and is $6.99 to unlock the full package.