A couple of streamlined solutions for reading documents on your iPad and news feeds on your iPhone are among today’s Fresh Apps. Check them out and more below.
Boom It Up! Free (iPhone, iPad) Free
It’s the simple games that are often the most fun, and Boom It Up! Free is pretty simple. A vertical scrolling game, it only has one control – you tap the screen to make your cannon ball “jump” and try to get as high as possible in a series of leaps from one location to another. Why it’s a cannon ball, I’m not really sure… I haven’t reached the end yet.
This is one of those deceptively easy to learn, challenging to master games that you can snag for free to fill a gap in your iPhone arsenal, or if you just feel like a little mindless fun for a minute or two.
Flow – The PDF Reader (iPad) $3.99
Here’s a handy app for the avid iPad user. Flow, as the name suggests, is a fast-moving PDF client that allows users to page through documents in a very simple and intuitive way. It basically presents a PDF document on your iPad the same way the tablet would display an e-book.
Flow has a lot of standard features – you can zoom in on content, swipe through pages, and adjust screen brightness – and the app is smart enough to keep track of your reading page and let you add bookmarks as well. More than anything, though, Flow seems like it provides comfortable accommodation for people who read lots of documents.
dockReader (iPhone) $0.99
Let’s not leave out iPhone users who want a comfortable reading experience too! Instead of PDFs, dockReader provides a streamlined RSS service that integrates status updates and other information from services such as Facebook and Twitter.
The app adds RSS feed articles to a timeline that includes status updates, allowing you to read sites you’re interested in basically as they’re being updated. Switch the display mode, and dockReader turns into a news ticker like the ones you might see at the bottom of CNN on TV, allowing you to quickly read headlines even from several feet away. The app also includes iPod functionality so you can add music while you’re reading.
Buzzes (iPhone) Free
I haven’t seen a Google Buzz client on the iPhone yet (then again, I haven’t been looking for one), but I have to say I like the simple nature of Buzzes. It presents information from the Twitter-like Google social networking service in a very simple flow, making it easy to navigate through posts and photos with a minimum of effort.
Buzzes is smart enough to allow its users to post items to Buzz as well as other social networking platforms (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) with just a couple extra taps. The whole app is quick, easy and free.
