Need help tracking money? After the insanity of Comic-Con last week, I know I do. This is why Mint.com Personal Finance’s timely update leads today’s Fresh Apps with the new ability to enter transactions on the fly. Read about this and 5 Degrees, an app for managing your online social relationships, below. After that, it’s time for some fun with Protoxide: Death Race, a futuristic 3-D racer, and Jumping Frenzy, a game that’s all about helping save things leaping out of skyscrapers with the use of a trampoline.
Mint.com Personal Finance update (iPhone, iPad) Free
Mint.com’s personal finance app is all about keeping track of what you spend and making responsible budgets, so it makes sense that a big new update to the app focuses on making tracking transactions easier. Previously, users could track their bank accounts and let the app create a budget for them, or create their own – now, new features allow users to make note of every time they spend money right in the app in real time.
Along with the new transaction functions, Mint’s new update also includes integration with Google Places, which allows users to geotag their transactions to specific locations. Accounts now feature current balances with updates for pending transactions so you can get a better estimate of how much money you actually have, as well.
5 Degrees (iPhone, iPad) Free
Instead of digging through multiple social networks to manage your personal and professional online relationships, you can use 5 Degrees, which aggregates all your online relationships into one place. The app lets you import Contacts from your iOS device and access their online profiles and social networking feeds so you can keep track of what they’re saying, what they’re up to and how you can engage with them.
The app doesn’t currently support Gmail, Facebook or LinkedIn contacts, but developer 5Degrees says it’s working on adding integration with those services, which will make the app even more powerful. As it stands, you can see what your contacts are sharing and divide them up into “circles” in order to keep related feeds and relationships well organized.
Protoxide: Death Race (iPhone, iPad) $2.99
A 3-D futuristic racing game, Protoxide puts you behind the wheel (or control stick, I’m not sure) of a warglider, a futuristic floating vehicle kind of like a land speeder from Star Wars. Using tilt controls, you can steer the vehicle around various tracks within the game while gathering weapons to take down your opponents and nitro boosts to leave them choking on your exhaust.
The game features four single-player modes with a campaign that covers 16 tracks, and there’s also a local multiplayer mode that you can access through a Wi-Fi hotspot. Working through the game allows you to unlock 12 different wargliders to take into races.
Jumping Frenzy (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
The “jump” in Jumping Frenzy seems to apply to all kinds of things, people and animals leaping from skyscrapers – presumably there’s a fire or somebody blew up something gross in an office microwave – in hopes of being caught by firefighters holding a trampoline on the ground below. You control those firefighters, moving them back and forth by either touch or tilt controls in order to catch just about everything you can as it falls through the air.
The more objects and living things you can catch, the higher your score, but letting animals and people fall to the ground will cost you lives that eventually end the game for you. Mixed in with the flying things are lions, which you need to avoid lest they be saved and chase away your trampoline team, and power-ups that give you bonuses. The goal is to rack up the highest score you can, with OpenFeint tracking the results on its leaderboards.
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