A favorite among iPad apps, Flipboard, has received a big and interesting update this week and leads our Fresh Apps list today because of it. Check it out below, along with Print Center, a mobile app for sending documents to OfficeMax stores’ printing facilities of the same name. And to take you into this long holiday weekend and keep you from getting bored, we’ve got Color Bandits, a bullet hell-type shooter from Chillingo, and Cavorite, a throw-back puzzle game with a 16-bit art style.
Flipboard update (iPad) Free
One of the best iPad apps available in the App Store – indeed, Apple’s top pick for 2010 – is Flipboard, an app that aggregates RSS feeds, content subscriptions and social networks like Twitter and Facebook and places them on an easy-to-read format that resembles a newspaper page. But Flipboard has gotten even better with its recent update, which adds a number of new features, like LinkedIn integration and curated lists.
Flipboard now pipes in news stories from people in users’ LinkedIn networks. LinkedIn bills itself as a business-oriented social network, so the news stories that individuals in your network throw onto it will likely have a professional angle. With curated lists, Flipboard editors actually troll for news content worth pushing to the app that users might want to read. Other improvements, like flags that mark stories as being popular with other Flipboard users to draw more readers in, are also part of the update. Overall, it gives iPad owners a whole lot of new stuff to read.
Print Center (iPhone, iPad) Free
Make printing important documents and presentations easy with Print Center from OfficeMax. The app allows you to quickly order print jobs from one of 900 OfficeMax Print Center locations across the U.S. All you need is the document or file and an idea of what you want, be it color or black and white, multiple copies or a bound report. You can send the document ahead of you to print, then pick it up when you arrive.
Documents pulled from email can be added to Document Libraries within Print Center that make sending orders to OfficeMax stores quick and easy, and you can add photos and other files saved on your iPhone or iPad to the documents you want printed. Procrastinators, squeeze every last second out before your next assignment deadline for school or work with the help of Print Center.
Color Bandits (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
When an evil mad scientist steals all the color in the world, it’s up to you, a super-cool cat with a ray gun, to stop him and his evil mechanoid monsters. Color Bandits is a 2-D side-scrolling game from Chillingo of the bullet hell genre, with a constant flood of enemies blasting away at the player and the only hope of survival lying in quick reflexes and a steady aim.
Color Bandits comes with two game modes: the Adventure mode, which has you working through several levels to restore color to the world; and Survival mode, in which you’ll try to see how long you can last while battling an endless horde of bad guys. You also get Game Center support for leaderboards and achievements.
Cavorite (iPhone, iPad) $1.99
A scientist and the inventor of an anti-gravity spray, Dr. Cavor embarks on a trip to the moon in the late 1890s. What he discovers there are creepy green spacemen who drag him off into a cave and dismantle his ship. As the good doctor, your job is to solve a series of side-scrolling puzzles using your anti-gravity spray and your wits to move boxes and activate switches, all the while collecting pieces of your ship so you can escape and return home.
Each puzzle becomes more and more difficult as you advance, requiring you to think quickly and carefully about how to solve it. You can push crates in Cavorite to activate switches and help Dr. Cavor reach new heights, and spraying those crates with the anti-grav foam sends them flying through the air, along with the doctor if he chooses to hold on. All these elements make for some interesting puzzles that will have you thinking vertically as well as horizontally in order to find their solutions.
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