Sure, there are a lot of ways to take and keep notes on your iPhone or iPad. But most of them don’t actually preserve the feeling of using notebooks – which is why Pad & Quill is kind of nice. It’s a note-taking app that maintains the feel of actually writing notes, and it tops today’s Fresh Apps list. It’s followed up by Chumkee, an image-sharing social network that relies on using photos and videos to share your life. Spearfishing 2 brings first-person scuba-diving spear fishing back to the App Store, complete with shark attacks, and leads our games picks. Finally, there’s Trenches II, the follow-up to the popular side-scrolling strategy title.
Pad & Quill (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
Pad & Quill is a note-taking app that seeks to capture the feeling of an actual notebook. It has a retro, pen and paper (or in this case, pad and quill) feel that seeks to make it easy to write things down but still keep the whole experience visually interesting. The app affords you all the high-tech features you’d expect, like syncing your notes over multiple devices and the ability to organize notes and search through them.
The thing that sets Pad & Quill apart from other note-taking apps is its visual style. You can customize your “notebooks,” allowing you to organize your apps into various locations in the app to keep them straight, and give them all unique looks. You can also share notes with others through email and create an infinite number of notes.
Chumkee update (iPhone, iPad) Free
Social networking app Chumkee is all about sharing images and videos in order to create a “montage” of your life for others to see. The app lets you snap photos and videos with your iPhone or iPad and share them with others, but the app isn’t just about posting photos – it also lets you comment on other people’s work with photos and videos, too.
Chumkee just got a big update, adding the ability to see what’s hot among other users and meet new people through popular posts. You can also share your posts with other social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, and block users on Chumkee.
Spearfishing 2 (iPhone, iPad) Free
Take to the deep blue sea in Spearfishing 2 and do exactly what you might expect: use a spear gun to do some fishing as you swim around the shallow, clear blue waters. You play a diver in a first-person shooter type game, tasked with spearing certain kinds of fish to earn money and buy new equipment. But all your fishing assignments are timed, so you’ll need to move fast and identify your targets as quickly as possible.
As you amass money, you’ll be able to get equipment that makes finding fish easier, swimming faster, and your spear gun more accurate. You’ll also need to make sure to avoid getting shredded by aggressive fish and massive sharks, and to keep track of your oxygen levels throughout each mission.
Trenches II (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
The sequel to the popular (but now defunct) strategy game has just hit the App Store, taking players back to World War I in a side-scrolling title in which you’ll control British troops to fight off enemy German soldiers. The core gameplay that you loved from Trenches is still there, requiring you to choose your forces and deploy them to take over enemy trenches and push back the Germans, but the game has been expanded greatly in this latest iteration. For starters, you can choose your side, playing as the British, French or Germans.
In Trenches II, you’ll choose your path through the war, picking which locations where you’ll fight your battles to define your campaign. There’s also multiplayer support so you can take on other players, 20 different units to choose from as you define your forces, and Game Center support to provide leaderboards and achievements.
