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The barrage of mobile Marvel games keeps coming. A few days ago Disney released Avengers Alliance 2. A sequel to the turn based social media game where players assembled strategic teams of heroes and villains to poke each other until you inevitably ran out of game currency. It was probably the only time you ever dug through […]

Marvel’s latest licensing partnership in mobile gaming had sparked interest in the days leading up to its release this past weekend. Avengers Academy key art looked fresh and compelling. It looks like a series Marvel Animation should be producing. However, no gameplay videos were available for us to see and after spending a weekend with […]

Title: Post-it Plus

Cost: Free, with in-app purchases

Platform: iOS

From LiveScribe to Moleskine, there have been a number of visions on how to capture the physical process of notetaking in a digital incarnation. Like many with a love for stationary, I had played around with the digital sticky note applications, but when a student raved about the Post-it app, it sounded like something more than a mere yellow placeholder.

There are two methods for creating notes. You can add them with a click, as you might in decades-old Windows programs, or your can photograph your actual physical notes. The in-app photography mechanism is among the easiest I've seen, coaching you on light levels and holding your device steady. But it's what happens when you take that picture that sets this app apart.

In contrast with Evernote and its associated applications, Post-it Plus is a little different: it doesn't attempt to make sense of your writing. Each note remains its own image, which can be dragged and dropped into intuitive order. But you can write more on the notes, or even use a typewriter gadget for longer, more legible input, or even delete it altogether after you have capture or refined the sentiment.

Your scanned notes retain their original colors, but a $2 in-app purchase gives you access to a rainbow's worth of post-it color options, which also make for fun organizational options. When you're done with your creation, you can share it in a range of file formats, depending on your needs.

Post-it Plus is a possible solution for students, teachers, and librarians, or anyone else looking for digital brainstorming and storyboarding tools that can be output in a variety of file formats. The transformation of the fixed physical into the mutable digital is bound to give you a little thrill, too.

Check out more Apps of the Week in our Archive. Know an app you'd like to see featured? Let us know.

AniRef is an app created especially for animators who need to record, analyze, and track arcs in reference footage. It was created by recent Ringling grad Paolo Cogliati who currently works at The Mill in New York. “Ive been taking it around with me outside of the studio and recording spontaneous things I find and see while roaming the city,” he says of the demo below. “This child walked into frame without me knowing while I was recording people’s feet to scrub through, and made my day! I don’t think I’ve ever seen something so close to a Pinocchio walk in real life!” The app includes the following features: Record actions and add to your library for future reference Analyze footage frame by frame, at multiple frame rates Track arcs, spacing and timing by positioning trackers View your tracking in 4 different display modes Export and Email your tracked footage as .mov and import into your 2D/3D software for ease of workflow Playback in slow motion or at 24 FPS> Bookmark your key poses with the StarPose tool and toggle from key to key Know exactly what frame you are on with the embedded frame count Save your reference to the AniRef library, separate from your regular videos for easy finding and privacy AniRef on the iOS is available for $4.99 on the App Store. For more info, visit AniRef.com. Don’t miss any updates from Cartoon Brew. Join Cartoon Brew on Facebook!

Name: Leafsnap
Platform: iOS
Cost: Free

Leafsnap has languished for years on my phone. The app represents the sort of big audacious online project that we as librarians need to know about. Merging geographic location with image recognition, it combines reports from the field to produce an interactive electronic guide.

For the end user, Leafsnap is designed to make a “best guess” about the species of a plant, based on an image of a leaf you upload or input through the camera. I hadn’t been able to use it before last week. It’s limitation? Spearheaded by the Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution, Leafsnap is crowd-sourced, and a caveat warns that the database best reflects the northeasten U.S. for the time being (though there is a U.K. version, too). When I heard someone speculating about the name of a specific tree while I was in Massachusetts, I was happy to put the tool to work.

One word on technique: I had better success when I photographed and cropped around a leaf beforehand, and you will need a “true white” background — the reverse side of an index card works fine. The app converts your image into an “x ray” of the leaf, queries the database and returns with a series of options, all of which contain Leafsnaps as well as more holistic images of matching plants.

Using the apps involves creating an account in Leafsnap’s user-driven botanical database to track your scanning and positive identifications. Inside the app, you’re creating your own log book, marking each species with a swipe, with a geographic distribution as well.

The process of collecting and marking specimens can be addictive; even your most tender-hearted teen will respect the do-no-harm approach to nature the app represents. Within the database, the specimens link to the Encyclopedia of Life, another ambitious, crowd-sourced online project, and there’s an integrated program designed to improve your recognition skills.

It only occurred to me after the fact that leafsnap enables a twenty-first century manifestation of the very nineteenth century impulse for classification among amateur botanists. For contrast, you can see a digitized version of Emily Dickinson’s old school herbarium here.

Leafsnap offers a fun, mobile way to involve the natural world in your summer STEM programming. And while the geographic scope of the database might seem to limit its utility, I’ve found that it works just fine beyond the specified region.

Have a suggestion for App of the Week? Let us know. And find more great Apps in the YALSA Blog’s App of the Week Archive.

App: Pocket Avatar
Cost: Free
Platform: Android and iOS

Although Intel might not seem like a company that is focused on fun and entertaining apps, they recently released an iOS app that could change this perception. Pocket Avatar detects a user’s facial expressions and maps them onto a personalized avatar.

Getting started with Pocket Avatar requires that you create an account, but once you have, the process of making your video avatar is fairly easy. You can choose from a wide variety of characters, including over twenty that are free. The paid characters are generally $.99 and include pop culture icons such as a Care Bear and Lego Movie characters. Once you have selected and downloaded your chosen avatar, you can start recording. Pocket Avatar can record from either camera on your iPhone, making it simple to create an avatar for yourself or for a friend. Before you start recording, you will have to line up the face to be recorded in a field on your screen. You can then record up to 15 seconds of both video and audio. Rather than recording your actual face and voice, Pocket Avatar maps the expressions you make onto your selected avatar and masks your voice by making it deeper. Once you have finished recording, you can opt to either eliminate the sound completely or swap to a high-pitched version of your voice. At this point, you can also change the avatar to any other character in the app.

Finished avatars can be named and then shared via text message, email or Twitter. The results are a fun mix of the user’s own facial expressions and a cartoon character. I found that the facial recognition worked fairly well and I expect that it will improve over time. This app will appeal to Twitter users and those who frequently send text messages. If you fall into one of these categories, you should check it out!

Title: Moju
Platform: iOS
Cost: Free

The best apps for mobile devices are generally those that take advantage of the features inherent in smartphones and tablets. Often this leads to apps that integrate with your device’s camera or accelerometer/gyroscope, but in the case of Moju, the app takes advantage of both to create a unique animation for images. By combining up to 24 separate photos, Moju creates images that change as you turn your iPhone to create the effect of an animation.

To start creating these unique animations, you simply tap the camera icon in the upper right corner. This will take you to a separate page that has a grid displaying your camera’s view at the top of the screen and a large blue button underneath it. A small wrench icon at the bottom of the display allows you to flip the camera so you can take an animated selfie, remove the gridlines from the display or restart your photo if you don’t like your first attempt.

Once you are ready to start your animation, you can take up to 24 pictures that will be combined into a single animated image. You can either do this by tapping the blue dot once for each picture you want to take or you can touch and hold the blue dot to take 24 pictures in quick succession. After you have the images that you want combined into an animation, you can tap next to preview it and pick any of twelve filters (all named for astronomical bodies). Tapping next again after that gives you the option to write a caption, decide whether make the animation public or private, and post to Facebook or Twitter.

Posted animations appear in the Moju app’s stream and from there you can like or comment on animations or change the privacy setting or caption of your own animations. You can also share animations on Facebook, Twitter, email, or via URL from within the Moju app. While the animations work best on an iPhone, since they then move only when the device is turned, they can also be viewed on any browser. When viewed in browsers, animations move automatically or when you move your mouse. Moju is a fun new take on photo apps and it is definitely worth trying out.

Title: Plain Text 2
Platform: iOS
Cost: Free

When my school adopted iPads for AP and pre-AP students, one roadblock some students encountered involved working away from wireless networks. I showed some how to set up individual Google docs for offline access, but sometimes students wanted to begin typing an assignment and hadn’t created or adjusted a doc so they could access it at home. Plain Text 2 provides an excellent word processing platform for those instances, and it’s clean interface has made it a go-to for writing many documents.

If you’re thinking Notepad, the text isn’t THAT plain. Fonts include Helvetica, Courier, and Times New Roman, and you can adjust the font between 10 and 24 points…the only down-side is that whatever you specify is set for the document, so you can’t alternate fonts or sizes. You can also double-space, much to the delight of my students working on English papers, and there is a running word count and Flesch-Kincade Grade Level and Readability Scores (under the “info” option). An extended keyboard provides convenient access to the most commonly used symbols without toggling.

You can create folders for organization and sort documents by date and name, both ascending and descending, and specify the way folders and documents appear as well. Best of all, you can set it up to sync with Dropbox and iCloud…so our students can write at home, sync without any action on their part once they’re back on campus, and then access the online file from any connected device for further manipulation or printing.

You can pay an additonal $4.99 to remove ads, but they don’t seem a huge distraction. Librarians might want to share the Privacy option which disables analytics, too.

This app has been a lifesaver for many students on our campus.

Apple just released the new version of their mobile operating system, iOS 7, with a new user interface that streamlines both form and function — it’s colorful and intuitive, but stripped-down and clean. Apple fans have been abuzz since they announced the update a few months ago, and we started …

Pentode: a 3d maze game for iOS handhelds - main menu game demo ipad screen test 3/28/13 vine.co/v/bjdgdhuFIJU

— DAiN8) (@DainFagerholm) March 28, 2013

If you use the Amazon Kindle app on your Apple device, you should not install the latest update for the app. According to some sources, the update could hurt your entire library.

AppNewser has more details:

Do you like reading eBooks on your iPhone or iPad using Amazon’s Kindle app? Then here’s a tip, don’t download the latest update 3.6.1. This advice is coming straight from Amazon. The company posted this note on the app’s listing in iTunes: “There is a known issue with this update. If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Following the recent notifications refresh, we’re super excited to announce that you can now get comment Push Notifications on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Stay connected to your blog and moderate incoming comments wherever you happen to be at the time.

Push Notifications
WordPress.com contributes to many Open Source WordPress apps, and we recently enabled notifications for the WordPress for iOS app. As soon as you get a new comment on posts you’ve published, a notification is sent to your phone. You will see the name of the commenter as well as a short excerpt of the comment, as much as we can fit. Swipe over the notification to view the comment.

We’ve also added a new “Swipe-to-moderate” feature in the comments list. This enables you to quickly Approve/Unapprove, Trash, Spam, and reply to new comments – it’s all just a swipe away. Of course you can still tap Edit to bulk moderate comments and tap the comment to view it in all its glory. In the detailed view you’ll see the post they commented on, their Name, Email, and URL, as well as an array of buttons for simple moderation.

Read Blogs on the Go
Did you also know that you can read your friends’ blogs with the app? When you open WordPress for iOS, tap “Read” to launch the mobile version of the Reader. You can read up on blogs you follow, see posts you’ve Liked, browse Freshly Pressed, and peruse popular Topics to find new sources of inspiration. When you find something interesting, you can Like or Reblog it to your own blog. You can even comment on posts you find right on your phone. And here’s the best part: it’s all synced back to your regular Reader.

Of course it’s also a great way to share quick photos when you’re out and about, write a post or two, update your About page, and check your daily Stats. It’s like having a mini-version of your blog in your pocket.

Get the Update
Already have WordPress for iOS installed on your phone? All you need to do to get Push Notifications is to update to the latest version and allow the app to send you notifications when asked.

New to WordPress for iOS? No problem, you can learn more about the app on its website, or click here to download WordPress for iOS directly! WordPress for iOS is available in most common languages and works on all newer iOS devices.

What’s Next?
This is the first time we’ve enabled Push Notifications in the iOS app, and we’ll continue to add more notification options so you’ll be able to have a full WordPress.com experience from your device. We’ll also make sure you get the notifications you want, when you want them. You’ll be able to toggle what Push Notifications you want to receive and which ones you’d rather not get notified about.

Learn more about the app and what’s next on the WordPress for iOS Blog, and make sure to follow @WordPressiOS on Twitter to get the latest news first.

So, hurry up and update your WordPress for iOS app to the latest version, and start using those notifi

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