An APP a day helps you doctor your play: Five to fit in

Image by Yutaka Tsutano Some apps are designed to help you work better, some to make it easier to socialise, but without a doubt, the most fun of them are the ones that help you play. There are, of course thousands of apps out there covering all of those functional categories, but since I’m feeling playful, let’s take a whistle-stop look at some of the lightweight leisure apps that have taken my fancy recently.

Just to refine this down slightly, I’m going to restrict this to tablets. There is a growing distinction between the catch-all smartphone market and the less neat and nimble world of the tablet. It’s life in the slow lane maybe, but the practical implications of a larger device and a correspondingly bigger screen do make a difference. And that’s all-the-more true when it comes to the more sophisticated recreational software that’s out there.

This isn’t a scientific review; it’s just a reflection of some of the cool stuff I’ve come across recently. So, in no particular order, here goes:

Music: Some people are more musical than others, so I’m not going to introduce something that’s anything other than a baseline toy. But for all the music-making solutions out there, very few of them manage to combine the almost magical simplicity of Soundrop with its immediately pleasing outcome. 

Image by Yutaka Tsutano

Soundrop’s interface is so simple it looks almost like a throwback. The screen is simply made up of lines drawn by the user and an array of falling dots: when the dots hit the lines they sound a note, and as they fall together they start to make music.  The effects are wonderfully hypnotic. As free musical apps go, Soundrop is topping my chart right now.

Online Poker: Online casino gaming is booming right now and it will continue to do so. According to PWC’s Global Gaming 2015 Report, the online casino gaming revenue across the US, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Asia Pacific, Latin America and Canada will grow 9.2% during the next five years and naturally there are many big brands out there competing for a piece of the pie. Once you start to take a peek at what the big brands are offering it’s easy to see why it’s so popular. The games invariably deliver seamless functionality, good looks, and they really do generate a buzz of excitement as you pit your wits against competitors from all over the world. The ‘best of breed’ providers include sites such as 32red,Poker Stars and 888. They’re all good. For a Specifically Canadian example, click here to visit ca.32red.com. Read more about the PWC Report here.

Games: This is just something that caught my fancy. It’s one of those lightweight little games you’ll play for a day or two and then move on, but it’s free and it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to get up to speed, so what’s not to like?

The game is called Dumb Ways to Die and it involves you as the player trying to keep a bunch of especially stupid cartoon creatures from killing themselves in ever more zany ways. Anyone can play it, it’s got a great ear-worm of a theme song and for all the dumbness, it’s just one of those things you can’t help liking.

Brain training: Awarded both the judges prize and the top users’ choice at the 2014 Tabby Awards, Rosetta Stone’s Fit Brain Trainer does exactly what it says. It’s a commercial proposition, so the app is not free, but it is really fun to engage with, and provided you put the effort in it does work - I haven’t mislaid my keys for days. Of course the fact that Rosetta Stone is a Canadian outfit has nothing whatsoever to do with it inclusion here! 

Image by  M Glasgow  

Photography: Strictly speaking this next choice might struggle to fit into the leisure category, but it’s so breathtakingly good I wanted to mention it anyway. It’s the Guardian Eyewitness app for iPad which, very simply, brings you stunning news photography from around the world on a daily basis. It’s like a news summary in picture form.

But some of the images are just so beautiful and so striking that it is just one of those things that you keep going back to. There’s something about photography on a screen with a decent resolution that is so rich and so colourful that it’s just too delicious for words. And I guess that’s the point of this app. The whole idea is, of course that the images aren’t just there to be pretty, they convey the essence of a story in a way that a tired old newspaper never could. 

There you go, that’s my whistle-stop overview of my top five apps leisure of the moment. There are plenty of others around, of course. 32Red isn’t the only poker provider out there, Rosetta Stone isn’t the only brain training programme and the Guardian isn’t the only news site that’s distributing great news photography. Maybe I should offer these as signposts rather than actual recommendations. 

But take it from me, they are all heaps of fun