It’s all about things that are free today on our Fresh Apps list. Crackle is free, as are the Sony Entertainment movies and TV shows you can stream from inside it. Home Elephant is free, and it’s a great way to get in touch with your neighbors, as well as help keep your neighborhood safe from criminals. Finally, MagicPlan is free, and it’ll pay off with big savings as you create floorplans just using your iPhone that will let you plan and budget for repairs and renovations.
Crackle (iPhone, iPad) Free
Sony Entertainment’s Crackle allows users to stream all kinds of video content, including full, feature-length films and TV shows, right to their iOS devices. The app costs nothing to download, and streaming the content doesn’t cost a thing either — it’s all free. Grab this one, pronto.
Crackle is still pretty new, but its library of content is already huge. It has some awesome free gems, including full movies like Ghostbusters and Snatch, and TV shows such as Seinfeld. Sony claims it has hundreds of free movies and thousands of TV show episodes already available for streaming anytime.
Home Elephant (iPhone, iPad) Free
Feel like you wish you knew your neighbors better? Home Elephant might be for you — it’s a social network that’s not designed to catalogue your friends and family, but to be centered around neighborhoods. It allows neighbors to communicate instantly with one another, cultivating relationships and making the entire area safer.
Using Home Elephant, you can quickly and easily send messages back and forth in your neighborhood, or post information for all to see. That gives the app a number of uses, beyond just encouraging you to engage with your neighbors. It also helps with Neighborhood Watch programs, because it allows neighbors to instantly report what they see to one another. You can respond to alerts from other neighbors as well as post your own, and those reports can even include photos from your iPhone or iPod Touch’s camera.
MagicPlan (iPhone, iPad 2) Free
Use augmented reality to create floorplans in a flash with MagicPlan. The app lets you aim your iOS device’s camera at something like a corner or a wall, and MagicPlan maps it out for you. It does the measuring and the drawing, helping you to quickly create an easy to use floorplan map without having to do any of the more difficult parts.
Once you’ve made your floorplan, MagicPlan can help you further on the web. You can upload and view your plans on the MagicPlan website, and the app will help you budget for repairs or renovations, so you can be prepared with a plan before you tear up your walls prematurely.
