Baseball's trade deadline is a couple days away, and the All-Star Game is long over. They call this part of the season "the dog days of summer." It's not the first half. It's not the home stretch. It's that in-between time where you gotta just put your head down, keep racking up wins, and hope nobody gets hurt.
Of course, real life isn't baseball. But we normal folks wrestle the dog days of summer too. The back-to-school sales have started already, but there's still plenty of sweltering weather and long days to go before the seasons change again. If you need a midsummer pick-me-up, we found a few games in the App Store that can kill some time plopped next to an air conditioner, or in the bleachers at your kids' Little League game. And since Real Life doesn't stop in the summer, we found a couple really cool productivity apps on sale too.
Astroslugs Deluxe for iPad is a cute, low-key puzzle board game for iPad, and it's free for today (Friday) only. I first played it at GDC and thought it was fun (and would be great for kids) but puzzle games are totally my jam, so your mileage may vary. Then again, it's free, so what do you have to lose?
Super Ball Escape HD is free for the iPad until midnight tonight (Friday, July 29), so grab it fast. It's a tilt-controlled adventure game where you guide a ball through maze-like levels. If you like other ball-rolling games, check it out.
Further Beyond Fighting HD reminds me of many hours burned standing in front of Virtua Fighter machines in the climate-controlled arcades of Las Vegas hotel-and-casinos when I was 14 and that game just came out. (I'm not a hustler or anything; my family was on vacation and kids aren't allowed in casinos. Which might be why my parents took us to Vegas in the first place.) It's new to the App Store as of a couple of weeks ago, and priced at 99 cents for the remainder of July, which ends on Sunday. After that it'll be $6.99, so jump in the ring this weekend to get a cool 3D fighting experience for only a buck.
Nebulous Notes (for Dropbox) is a universal note-taking app that backs everything up to Dropbox, and also lets you open and edit plain-text files you already have in Dropbox. It's got a lot of cool bells and whistles, letting you preview notes in HTML or MarkDown, AirPrint support, it's even compatible with TextExpander and sports its own macro system. Usually it's $2.99 (with a Lite version available too), but it's free as of this writing.
Calvetica Calender is reduced from $4.99 to $2.99 for a limited time. This universal calendar app syncs with Google Calendar and Exchange, pulling the data from the default Calendar app in iOS, so it's right there the first time you open it up. But it goes beyond Calendar's functionality, letting you email or SMS event info to friends, easily set up repeating items, integrating a task list, and sporting better reminders, snoozing, and a clean, snazzy look. At $3 it seems like such a steal.
Have a great weekend...and stay cool.
