It has been a long week, but the weekend is finally here, as is some hopefully warm weather. Time to start thinking about concert season, which is why we’re bringing you Songkick Concerts as our leading fresh app. It scans your device’s music library and helps find your favorite artists’ tour schedules. After your concert-going experience, you can save the memories into interesting creations with Diptic. And while you’re waiting in line for tickets or concessions, consider a couple of games: Shape Shift, a match-3 game that tweaks the formula just enough to be a little bit fresh, and Bug Wings, a flying game that will test your skills at being a beetle.
Songkick Concerts (iPhone, iPad) Free
It can be tough to keep up with your favorite bands’ concert tours – often they’re lengthy and international, and dates aren’t always made extremely obvious to anyone who isn’t explicitly cruising the Internet and looking for them. Songkick Concerts takes out the guess work by scanning your iOS device’s music library and finding the bands you seem to like, then crossing that information against your location. The result is Songkick tracking down local concert dates for bands all on its own, and then funneling that information to you.
Songkick creates a personalized concert calendar for you and allows you to see what each concert for a band will be like, where it will be located and how you can buy tickets. You can browse through concerts in any city in the world and receive notifications for when bands you track release new tour information, as well; and Songkick will even let you track your concert plans within the app.
Diptic (iPhone, iPad) $1.99
Diptic is a photo app that lets you combine photos to “tell stories,” adding them together in a yearbook-style layout and allowing you to export them to show others. You can lay multiple photos together in different sizes and in different styles in order to convey a theme or a message (or whatever, really). Diptic contains 19 different layouts to mess around with.
After you’ve set the layout you’re going with, you can add effects to your photos or edit them slightly. Each photo gives you the ability to adjust the brightness, contrast and color saturation, and when you’re done, you can export the finished product to Facebook, Flickr, Posterous or email.
Shape Shift (iPhone, iPad) Free
There’s something of an endless parade of match-3 puzzle games on Apple’s iOS platform, but there’s a good reason for that – they can be addictively fun. Shape Shift is another fun addition to the match-3 march, subtly altering the dynamic of other games by allowing the player to move tiles around from around the screen. Each tile comes with a color and a shape – tiles with the same shape can be swapped, and groups of tiles with the same color are eliminated to score points.
Shape Shift includes two game modes; Classic, a level-based mode in which the player has to score as many points as he or she can while avoiding ticking bombs that appear on the screen, and Zen, which lets players go on and on for as long as they like. It also includes Game Center support for achievements and leaderboards.
Bug Wings (iPhone, iPad) $1.99
Take flight with Bug Wings, a game in which you’ll control a beetle’s flight path on a quest to collect objects from in the air to score points. The game uses a combination of tilt and touch controls to steer the beetle as he glides through each of Bug Wings’ 3-D levels. In each, you need to grab objects out of the air by steering through them, then land on a lily pad without falling off into the pond below.
There are 24 levels and four worlds available in Bug Wings, and the game also includes a multiplayer “party” mode that supports up to four players. The game tracks your scores locally on your device, so you can challenge friends and family to see who can nab the most points.
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