A pair of interesting social networking apps have hit the iTunes App Store this week, and they lead today’s Fresh iPhone Apps list. Formspring is a service that lets users ask each other anything, and Turntable.fm lets everyone be a DJ together, curating lists of music and voting on what songs they all want to hear next. Warp Dash leads today’s games selection, giving players a simple tilt-based racing-type experience, while Minions provides a pick-up-and-play, cartoony first-person shooter.
Formspring (iPhone, iPad) Free
You may have seen Formspring around the Internet. It’s a social networking service that allows users to ask each other questions. Visit someone’s Formspring page and you can ask him or her anything, and hopefully, he or she will answer you. Now take that idea and scale it down so it’s mobile, and you have Formspring’s app. It offers the ability to interact with users on Formspring from anywhere.
Formspring lets you ask questions of your friend sand contacts, and you can also respond to any questions posed to you through the service. The app also supports sending photos and gives you the ability to “smile” at question responses, as well.
Turntable.fm (iPhone, iPad) Free
Online music service Turntable.fm finally has an iPhone app, and it brings the coolness of the service’s website to you wherever you go. Turntable works by allowing multiple people to listen to the same music at once, except each person acts as a DJ, picking songs in order for the group to listen to. Everyone gets to vote on the songs, and if a song is panned too many times, it gets skipped.
You can become a “fan” of other DJs using the service who you think do a good job, and Turntable allows you to chat with other people hanging out in your virtual room as well. You can join in the music selection, or you can just listen to curated playlists from other users whenever you want.
Warp Dash (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
A tilt-controlled 3-D racing-style title, Warp Dash has some great graphics and a very cool future aesthetic. It also has very simple, very addictive gameplay: you control a futuristic racer that you steer by tilting your device left and right. It picks up speed as it goes, and your job is to dodge obstacles and collect triangles to score points. The more triangles you gather in a row before hitting a jump ramp (where you “turn in” your triangles), the more speed and distance (and points) you snag.
Warp Dash packs three difficulty modes to challenge yourself with, and randomly generated courses so every time you play, the game is fresh. Developer SGN also plans to release additional vehicles and tracks to play on, and the game includes Game Center support for achievements and leaderboards.
Minions (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
Mad scientists always seem to have minions, but in your case, your mad-science minions have rebelled and are taking over your mad science lab. Now, in order to continue your evil experiments and world domination plans, you need to clear out the minions and their machines in this single-player first-person shooter from the makers of Archetype.
You get four different kinds of weapons to use against your cartoonish minions as you battle them in each level. There are three different kinds of minions to fight, each with different tactics, and the game includes three ramping difficulty settings to keep you fighting hard. There’s also Game Center support, so you can check your skills against other players on Minions’ online leaderboards.
