Can you believe the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, in a time when having an ecological mindset was correlated more with wearing birkenstocks and eating – the horror – foods not provided in a colorfully designed cardboard box? The environmentalists of this era are often dramatized as hemp-wearing hippies who tied themselves to trees, rioted against fur, and adopted a neo-Native American lifestyle of rediscovering simpler living, away from the granite confines of city interiors. Forty years later, environmentalism has changed into the yuppie mainstream, for the better: our entire lexicon is rife with words like biodegradable, ecosphere, carbon footprint, community supported agriculture and more, colleges around the country are building LEED certified buildings, the new wave of electric cars are emerging this coming year, and corporate America is taking a more sustainable approach to business (well, some, not all). Recycling has long been accessible on our curbs and eating locally grown food – or growing your own food – has become trendier, even, than the Prius, itself.

The problem with living an eco-intelligent lifestyle, however, is there’s so much to consider and remember. Thanks to green iPhone apps, all this information and much, much, much more is now available at your fingertips. Green apps are sprouting up faster than, well, sprouts. In honor of Earth Day’s big birthday, we at Appstruck combed through many different eco-friendly apps for shopping, travel, transportation, eating out and more, so you have them ready at your green thumbs.

1. Animal-Free – FREE
Animal-Free is a pocket reference guide for many common and hidden animal ingredients. Whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, part-time veg or simply trying to shop veg-friendly, this app by Symbiotic Software will help you make conscientious shopping decisions. New vegans will appreciate the list of commonly misunderstood or unfamiliar vegan ingredients that will help expand your dietary horizons.

2. Gorgeously Green Survival Guide – 99 cents
The Gorgeously Green Survival Guide is a quick reference for busy women. Developed by bestselling author Sophie Uliano, Gorgeously Green guides you through the confusion of shopping for eco-friendly choices. One of the best features is the ability to create convenient and helpful shopping lists for everything from lip sticks to light bulbs.

3. Greenpeace Tissue Guide – FREE
The Greenpeace Tissue Guide allows you to make informed decision when shopping for recycled tissue and toilet paper. Experts have rated more than 100 brands as “recommended,” “could do better” and “avoid!”

4. Harvest – Select the Best Produce – $1.99
Harvest helps you skip packaged and processed foods with information on selecting the freshest, ripest, healthiest and best-tasting produce. Now you can knock on watermelons, smell pineapples and squeeze avocados with knowledgeable élan. (read review here)

5. Locavore – $2.99
Eat foods grown and raised locally without spending hours Googling data for tonight’s meal. Locavore provides government and NGO data by state. Click on the food item for Wikipedia info and Epicurious recipes. There’s no market-finder feature for in-season foods, but it sure beats printing lengthy lists of locally grown foods. (read review here)

6. TheGoodGuide – FREE
GoodGuide helps you find safe, healthy and sustainable products while you shop. Simply scan the product’s barcode to view detailed ratings for the health, environment and social responsibility of more than 65,000 products and companies.

7. CarCare – $4.99
CarCare automatically calculates your gas mileage at the pump and reminds you when it’s time to change the oil, rotate tires, get a wax or any other service you desire.

8. Green Gas Saver – FREE
Green Gas Saver tells you when you’re accelerating or taking a turn too fast, which can hinder your gas mileage. The idea behind the app is to keep the ball in the center of the screen. When you accelerate too quickly, the diameter of the ball increases and an alarm will sound, indicating you’re accelerating too quickly. Green Gas also keeps a running score so you can see how well you’re driving in real time. A few weeks with this app and driving efficiently will become ingrained.

9. Greenmeter – $5.99
Greenmeter by Cleantechnica tracks your car’s carbon footprint and fuel efficiency while calculating weather conditions, cost of fuel and vehicle weight. You also can measure drag coefficient, vehicle pitch and rolling resistance with estimates available at CleanTechnica.com.

10. Twavel – $1.99
Twavel isn’t just for wascally wabbits. It calculates the CO2 emissions associated with your travel choices and allows friends to compare their travel footprints.

11. Green Sushi Selector – 99 cents
Green Sushi Selector allows you to research whether the sushi fish you’re about to buy comes from threatened species or has been caught or farmed in ways harmful to the environment. Fish are listed both by their Japanese and common-market names. Additional features include health alerts for mercury and PCBs, as well as dietary recommendations.

12. VegOut – $2.99
Vegetarian offerings in many restaurants are often limited and boring. VegOut makes life a bit easier with the world’s largest international listing of vegan, vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. Search listings by your exact location or a customized location when on the road.

13. Geocaching Toolkit – FREE
Geocaching, the green outdoors game of hiding and seeking treasures, has caught on throughout the world. Geocaching Toolkit guides players between locations with clues involving puzzles, calculations and projecting a new waypoint using distances and bearings. Sometimes the calculations are easy, but this toolkit can help when calculations become tedious .

14. Lonely Planet Travel Guides – Prices begin at 99 cents
Lonely Planet Travel Guides are the guide of choice for many frugal and green travelers. Various apps provide paperless guides for both U.S. and international destinations. Some of the guides are buggy and need work, but Lonely Planet is working on updated versions. Tip: Read the reviews before buying.

15. BraveNewFilms – FREE
Find and access the latest, hard-hitting videos on social and economic issues. From exposing abusive health insurance companies to combating unregulated Wall Street greed, the videos on BraveNewFilms inform, challenge and recommend opportunities to take action.

16. Get Green – 99 cents
Get Green, from Candied Apple, provides you with daily ammunition in the battle against climate change.You’ll receive daily updates about how you can make a difference. Tips cover everything from green workplaces to green Halloween celebrations. It even has tips on how to reduce the carbon footprint of your wedding.

17. Green Charging – 99 cents
Green Changing reduces your energy consumption when you charge your phone. Launch the app when you start charging and it’ll notify you with sound and vibration when your battery is fully charged. Some of the best things are so simple.

18. Green Wars – $1.99
Based on the classic Drug Wars game, Green Wars requires players purchase environmental products for cheap and resell them for a profit. Manage your inventory to make the biggest profit on buying and selling recycled paper, LED light bulbs, reusable shopping bags, recycled paper and fixed-gear bicycles. Once you’ve earned some street cred by making deals, you can buy and sell high-end goods like solar items, geothermal pumps, carbon credits and hybrid cars.

19. iGreen – 99 cents
Stay current on the latest solar, hybrid, green and green tech news. Aggregated new sites on iGreen include About My Planet, Azo CleanTech, VentureBeat, Green Biz, Green Computing, Hybrid Car Blog and more.

20. MeterRead – $2.99
Read your meter with ease using your iPhone. Check it again later and MeterRead provides you with data to better control your power bill. This app from Zerogate displays the total kilowatt hours used since the last reading and calculates your total usage for the next 30 days.

I suppose because the show is so brilliant, I was expecting the recent app, InHouse, by FOX Broadcasting, to be the tv app par excellence. House, for anyone who watches the show, is all at once aloof, misleadingly roundabout, beguiling, a walking intertextual reference. His character is a puzzle, a conundrum, and yet he’s not that complex a person for having, almost innately, a genius mind for medical mysteries. If we want to winnow his character down to simplistic means, his self-imposed social ostracism grew from an adolescent narcissm -his intimidating and unreal breadth of intellect unknowingly stagnated any emotional maturity, and thereby arrested his development, forever entrenching him in those adolescent proclivities of egotism, rebellion, that sense of “no one gets me.” In short, a grown adolescent is an a**. You could almost reason this as the Occam’s Razor for personality. In all fairness, no one does truly understand House, just as no one understands why a teenager may break out in aggressive retort and slam his door shut; I suppose in that same manner, it’s nearly impossible to understand the House app.

The app begins and ends in confusion, with no clear instructions to guide you in its use, and with vague, cryptic sections that leave you feeling dissatisfied, a bit empty, confused, and perhaps even with a twinge of irritation. For that, it’s a success, because that is exactly how people feel after an interaction with House, himself. The app opens to a stark image of House facing you with that deeply cutting stare of his, as if those crystal blue eyes of his are already in the process of deconstructing you, ripping your every cell of character and thought apart for his own personal dissection and pleasure – his sadism of the mind. It’s actually a good picture of him, clearly delineated from the background, and exhibiting such detail, his 5 o’clock shadow nearly prickling out at you, that it made me do a double-take, wondering if I had HD on my phone. The next screen serves as the main page of the app, acting as a conduit – biologically, even, each tab is represented in the form of a neurotransmitter – for all the other features. There are 7 tabs, including Free Clinic, Appisodes, Houseisms, Writers Room, Music Room, Dark Room, and Media Room, each of which is heavily disappointing, and difficult to understand, instruction-wise.

Like any House nerd, I immediately took to the Houseisms route, because what would House be without the mocking, taunting witticisms he effortlessly peppers in every sentence? It was too bad I was unwittingly dismayed that the only “houseisms” present were the weakly written ones, like “You should have kept reading. Heart Disease is kind of below my pay grade.” Funny, to be sure, but only within the context of the episode. Also, it’s debatable whether a diagnostician would earn more money than, say, a heart surgeon, who deals with heart disease. Of course, House is a genius, and works at this highly regarded institution, and Cuddy has a soft spot for him, so it’s believable that his pay would be astronomical (despite other colleagues, like Taub, grumbling about settling for a lower pay than he would have had as a plastic surgeon). I did enjoy one of the house quotes, but I was annoyed that there were only three quotes, instead of the alleged four, the fourth one instead being a reminder from the creators to tune in next monday for more houseisms.

I was happy to hear House’s voice calling me a “free loader” when I tapped on the Free Clinic tab to check out next. He says something for each tab you select, but that’s the extent of House’s involvement – he’s mum, otherwise. Just like the Houseisms tab, I was disappointed that the environment shown in Free Clinic (House’s iconic desk, giant red ball, cluttered desktop and more) as well as all the other tabs is static, unable to be interacted with save for one element. The Free Clinic, it turns out, isn’t anything special – it’s just a place to enter in your information should you wish to be included in a weekly rally for free prizes, in the form of cast-signed props. Needless to say, I shamelessly plugged in my info.

The Dark Room was utterly confusing to me, the environment being set amidst a wall of x-rays that just act as film reels – only they’re static images, as well, just showing you various screenshots of the most recent episode. The Appisodes link is beyond bizarre: a video turns on with a man posing as “Nurse Jeffrey, coming May 24″ and the word Appisodes written in black bold, with a question mark. I’m all for mysteries – I watch House, after all – but this isn’t a mystery so much as a question mark left hanging, with you wanting to hang yourself from it. If there is anything absolutely worthwhile on this app, it is definitely the exclusive content in the Media Room tab. For this week, there’s an interview with actors Lisa Edelstein (Dr. Lisa Cuddy) and Robert Sean Leonard (Dr. James Wilson) discussing their experience with Hugh Laurie directing. I was laughing the entire time, watching Lisa’s life-changing and amazing description juxtaposed against Robert’s dry wit about Hugh’s vision, describing it as “the worst experience you ever had, add the Great Depression, and watching Parenthood six times in a row.” It was just an amazingly funny mock-interview – grandly entertaining, but not giving you any true information, at all.

I really wanted to like his app, but all I can say is I shouldn’t have expected anything more from FOX. House as a show, as a character, is beyond ingenious, but this app is convoluted to the point of no direction, no interest, and no interpretation. Not even the excellent interviews can save it. It certainly doesn’t do justice to the show. I’m sure most fans would rather surf the web for House-related trivia and facts, and still end up wasting their time in a more productive way than bothering with the InHouse app.

The game opens with a swingy rockabilly number that makes you want to dress in four inch heels, skintight black pants, and pizazz your way around a dimly lit red room, with all the rancorous excitement of a zoot-suit wearing, fedora-donning band, of course. The music conveys well the rush of the game, because all BirdStrike entails is you shooting a bug-eyed blue bird through the sky – flung, at first, from a tightly bound trapeze wire, and then literally skyrocketed up, up and away, into the clouds and beyond, collecting seeds and other points along the way.  The blue bird, with all his unassuming birdie air, is completely willing to put his pea-sized birdie brain into danger, slamming into objects both on the way up and down, and just generally willing to put his life in your hands. I thought his name funny, and in some odd way, fitting for a classic bird who might otherwise be named the cliche Birdie, Petey, or Chickie – his name is Gerald.

When Gerald is launched from the bottom of the screen, you’ll notice a row of red and white striped rockets right above him. As you fling Gerald into the air, he straps on one of these rockets to launch himself quickly up, where the rocket eventually fizzles, and you must make the quick decision to either steer him toward another rocket plugged stationary up there, or steer Gerald as he’s falling down to one of the rockets left below. Steering Gerald is just a matter of tilting your iPhone left and right, and to make matters easier when a rocket fizzles, he flutters stationary for a moment, before pitching his head down and plummeting in a nosedive toward the ground. Gerald, for all aristocratic, dated names, is one daring fellow.

After turning into a flaming, green inferno.

Just when you think you’ve successfully maneuvered Gerald into the safe, upper reaches of the sky, you encounter a UFO, with green lights and one, extendable, robotic arm, that shoots Gerald with one ZZAPP, turning him into a burning ball of green and yellow flames. But, take no pity on your keen, feathered friend. Gerald takes this as an opportunity to destroy any hindrances on the way down, a bit like an act of revenge – you earn points by colliding the burning Gerald with scaffolding, and other things that he would, in his normal blue-feathered state, bump his head upon. 300 points are earned for each object you destroy, which rewards you more than all the eggs you collect, which are 200 points apiece. The best way to earn points in this game is to steer Gerald clear of any obstacles – the game awards you a whopping 2600 points for a certain chunk of time spent in clean flight.

Oh no!!

Other than the flying around, the rockets, the bumping of Gerald’s head, and his transformation into a ball of fury, there’s not much to this game. If you’re looking for more levels, more action, more complexity, please look elsewhere. Birdstrike is straightforward meaningless, in the best way possible. You launch a bird, you pay attention, avoid obstacles, try to rack up points, and enjoy the highly pleasing graphics and sound effects. It’s silly, frivolous, and giddy wrapped in one blue bird. Didn’t I tell you it was a good way to start the morning?

Thankfully, there’s not much to say about the app. Trust me, this is a good thing. History is too vast, even, to define – have you ever noticed how the most complex things are often the most simply defined, as if we know a whole subject matter cannot be easily winnowed down to scalable proportions, and so a scant, almost trite selection of words are paired up to give meaning, a “study of past events” representing the whole, overwhelming mass that is history? There is no way to contain the entirety of history within a definition, let alone an iPhone app, and so On This Day wisely pares down the information contained within to Births, Deaths, and the vague category of “Events” that generally covers only the most highlighted, or most obscure of factoids, for the purpose of entertaining frivolity.  The again, plenty of the history given in this app is amazingly random, which prompts me think, how did they choose what to cover? For today, April 07, one fact given in that in the year 529 the first draft of the Corups Juris Civilis (a fundamental work in jurisprudence, i.e. the theory of law) was issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I. Well, that’s plenty interesting, but what am I going to do with this little tidbit of information? It’s been a few years since Western Civ in college. Thankfully, On This Day is a step ahead: for each historical listing in the app, there are several highlighted bits that link you to Wikipedia articles should you wish to know more. This is assuming, of course, that you already have Articles – The Wikipedia app – a recent release – but in case you don’t, the app offers you the option to add it.

So, what else happened today, on April 07? In 1860, Will Keith Kellogg, that famous American entrepreneur who created Corn Flakes and other favorite Supermarket cereal brands, was born. El Greco, one of my favorite, undefinable artists, also died on this day in 1614. In 1788, American Pioneers to the Northwest Territory arrived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers, establishing Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement of the new United States in the Northwest Territory, and thereby opening westward expansion of the new country. In 1906, Mount Vesuvius erupted, devastating Naples. For every day in this app, it seems as if there are at least 50 entries each for Births, Deaths, and Events, so there’s plenty of reading to be done, should you be of the factoid kind. All of this reading is made easier from the app’s excellent navigation – simple, with the option to rifle through the calender and dates, or just tapping through arrows, day by day -  and handsome design, which bears an homage to antiquity with its weathered, yellowed pages, and notepad interface.

It’s not be the most exciting app, or even, arguably, the most productive – I’m sure plenty of people will be miffed about how it needs internet to work, though I think that’s a minor quibble. In all honestly, I probably won’t use it very much, if I use it at all. I’m not sure what I was expecting with this app, but after checking it out, it’s probably the very best it could be. It’s just a collection of facts, in a well-designed package, and if that’s what you’re seeking, then this is the app for you. It won’t win any awards, and likely has a shelf life as dated as the facts contained within, but hey, at least it’s not a thinly veiled attempt at recycling an existing app under the guise of an original one. I actually kind of like it.

Enter Twistrix by Avalon Alliance. Now, this is a puzzle game – it’s name is even a bit of a puzzle, spinning fumbles on your tongue. The concept is similar to a rubik’s cube in that there are moving bits and pieces, all involving configurations of sorts, that, once resolved, lend the puzzle to becoming organized by color scheme. However, unlike the rubix cube, there is no set algorithm for solving the puzzle – you must instead rely on a sequence of logic, moving pieces one slot at a time, and filling empty slots with other pieces. In this manner, Twistrix resembles more those sliding puzzles kids get for free in goodie bags from Chuck E Cheese, or as party favors, the puzzles scrambled in a small, 2 inch square with many squares within, that, once arranged in order, reveal a stunning, teenage heartthrob or puppy.

Twistrix is arranged in its own, unique fashion. If it resembles anything at all, it would be a traffic light, with its initial red and green colored dots, set inside a revolving gray-green turntable of sorts. The entire contraption may be spun to the left or right, or you may spin individual rows, once again, to the left or right. All the rows stacked upon each other (each level has varying amounts of rows) create columns, of which only one is facing you at a time, but each holds its own assortment of colored balls. An empty slot is available each round – sometimes more – to aid you in moving the balls around, and you must figure out how to move the balls – up and down, rotating the rows – so that each column holds a stack of like colored balls (i.e. a stack of 5 red balls). To make matters more challenging, as you progress through the levels, more colors are added.

The graphics may not be particularly stunning, and sometimes my finger will fail to illicit a response from the game, but Twistrix accomplishes its most important goal: it’s a brain twister, in a deeply furrowed brow kind of way. I admit to fumbling a bit on the first round – the first round - and I sheepishly twisted things, moved things here and there, before I finally developed a feeling for the game. It’s not that the game, itself, isn’t intuitive, it’s just the mechanism, the turntable, is a puzzle premise unlike any I’ve seen, and so it took a few moments for my brain to register the logical progression of things. Once I understood the mechanism, it was free-flying; mind you, I’m not saying it was easy, merely, the puzzles made sense. And, that is the best puzzle of all.

Upon further inspection, Intel Postcards from the Future (kind of a long-winded name, isn’t it?) proved to be very simple, and amusing to boot. There was scarce information online to help me figure out what the app was, so the best way, obviously, was just to tinker around with it. It’s prettily done, covered in the seemingly patented Intel blue and silver, and the postcard process is broken down into three, easy steps for the user – pick a theme, choose a photo, then save & share. There are two postcard types available in this app, the Flatter*E Bot – whose name, I thought, was a cute wordplay on the word flattery – and Doodle Bot. Flatter*E Bot resembles slightly, if a bit more clunky and industrial-looking, like a retro 60′s robot, the Eva exploration robot

Not the best picture of me, but it'll do.

in the movie WALL-E, the one our heroic little trash bot falls in love with. Flatter*E will scan your photo, once you choose one, and compliment the person in the photo with one of five phrases, my favorites being, “Warning: Subject overheating my central processing unit,” and “Danger: Hot carbon life form detected in vicinity.” I appreciate geek cheesy, but if this isn’t up your alley, then look elsewhere. You may, instead, prefer the Doodle Bot, who mischievously spray paints one of three designs on your photo: a mad professor, alien antennas, or a hairy monster. They’re all stenciled in black and white, and have an appealing, cartoonish nature to them.

See that little guy? That's Doodle Bot. He likes to draw. On your face.

Surprisingly, the mechanism for applying Doodle Bot’s graffiti patterns is a little laborious, and not terribly intuitive. In a few other apps of a similar premise (i.e. stencil graphics applied to a photo) the graphics mechanism was designed so that the decal, or stencil, was itself manipulated, rather than the photo, as with the Intel app. Meaning, you interact with and move the stencil, not the background. In this Intel Postcards app, the stencil design in static, in the center, and you must move and zoom the photo in the background to fit within the parameters of the stencil. It just seems like the other design makes more sense. The animations are cute, though, with both the bots zipping around onscreen in the foreground of your chosen photo, using their scanner rays, and then spray painting or squeaking out, in a highly digitized voice, just how hot the person in the photo is

While the app, overall, is very cute, and inspired indeed, it offers little in the way of in-app editing and postcard customization. Hopefully, in future versions the developers will create more robots, more animations, and more editing tools. In the meantime, I can’t help but feel a little let down by the “Sponsors of Tomorrow.”

Despite its eccentric title worthy of some 1980s spoof horror film, Speargun Hunter 3D  by Yossi Malki is a deceptively good game. Once you get past the dated-looking intro screen, and the hokey ringtones that accompany any tab selection, the game proves to have decent graphics – at par with DeerHunter 3D and what you’d expect from other hunting games – and a very decent spectrum of sound effects, ranging from your snorkeling tube releasing air bubbles, to the thick, almost soupy kick of your fins, and the trickling echo, the eerie drone that permeates the

Aiming can be tricky - use your fins to catch up with those fishies

ocean below. I took amusement in one comment a user posted on the iTunes Store about how the only thing he heard was, “the sound of my fins and my tank.” *pause* Well, what do you expect? You’re underwater… in the ocean… in skintight rubber. Do you expect there to be sound in space, too? Star Wars is fiction, little fella. On a different note, I was pleasantly surprised at the range of fish exhibited in this game, in particular the attention to detail the developers gave to the Yellowfin Tuna, and the Groupper. Fish aficionados can rest assured that the different fish species are easily identifiable – and, of course, what ocean would be complete without an ominous, great white shark?

The game is presented through the first person vision of your scuba diving character. Your view is encapsulated by the perimeter of your goggles – as they would when actually scuba diving – and your depth and health are monitored right where your air intake valve would be. To the right are your controls for both kicking your fins for a burst of speed, and to shoot your speargun weapon, when the moment to strike occurs. On the left is your motion control, in the form of a poorly-constructed joystick that proves to be insensitive to touch, unless you precariously center your thumb on the center at all times – a task more difficult than it sounds. The tilting control proves even more difficult to manage – at least the joystick is easy to operate, if a little stubborn at times. Your oxygen is monitored by a yellow tube to the left of your air intake valve. It seems you’re at a constant risk of low supply, or else you have the smallest capacity tank on the market, because you sure

Don't mess with the Great White Shark. Trust me.

do run out of oxygen fast in this game. Be prepared to swim to the surface to resupply, otherwise you’ll be swimming with the fish permanently.

The game is divided up into 10 levels, with different objectives for each. In the free version for Speargun Hunter, only the first three are available, and then the option to upgrade is presented as an option for $0.99. When learning the controls, the first level seems like a huge challenge – learning to aim with the joystick took a few minutes, and even then the fish swim about erratically, as they seem to do in life, making aiming that much more frustrating. To boot, there are sharks, stingrays and other predators floating around, and they’ll eat the fish if you’re not quick enough to spear them first – or, even worse, if your aim is a little off, you may end up spearing them, instead, and then, boy, are you in a world of trouble. Or, should I say, ocean of trouble? If I were physically in the ocean, I’d probably be draining all my oxygen just hyperventilating in anger. Hey, I just solved the mystery of why your character is always low on oxygen.

Despite the slight lagginess (it’s probably better on the 3GS model), Speargun Hunter distracted me enough with its cool, blue jets of light streaming into the depths of the ocean environment, radiating off the shark as it swum past me, its black, expressionless eyes staring out at nothing, and yet everything. If the gameplay were not up to snuff, the game is beautiful enough to keep you returning to it again and again; thankfully, the gameplay is up to snuff, and the challenges posed in each level get progressively more tricky, keeping you at the edge of your fins. If you haven’t strapped on the scuba gear before, you can at least try out this game, and battle a shark head on.

I was born in 1984, and while erring a bit on the too-young side to truly appreciate, say, the classic Atari, or The New Kids on the Block, maybe even acid-washed jeans, midriff t-shirts and neon yellow shoelaces, it goes without saying that I’m a product of the 90s. Every kid knows the game Simon Says, and when I little, maybe around 5 or 6, I remember a few of my friends had this cool, electronic Simon game, where you had to tap the red, green, yellow, and blue buttons in the same order that the computer dictated. The Nintendo DS sure ate up a bunch of my time – as did swinging in birch trees, we the feral youth of Pennsylvania – but for young and adult minds alike, there are few things more enterprising, and addicting than a simple game of pattern recognition.

That handheld Simon game was a hit, of course, and it’s still in toy stores around the globe today, so why mess with a good thing? Thankfully, Category 5 Games thought the same thing – it helps that their tagline is “We make the games we want to play.” You sure do, Category 5. There’s another Simon Classic on the iTunes Store – with the same title, even, only no colon punctuation – but this version by Category 5 Games has managed to skyrocket to the top of the most downloaded free apps list. And, for good reason: it, pure and simple, is classic Simon.

The game’s design is no more, and no less, than the classic Simon interface of a circle divided into four quadrants of green, red, blue, yellow, starting from the upper left and moving clockwise. Each colored quadrant rings out a different pitch, for the player to recognize sounds not just by sight memory, but by sound memory. Oh, the ingenuity, classic Simon. When reciting the game’s pattern to you, Simon lights up the sequence to follow, and you must tap the colored quadrants in the same, exact manner. For the gung-ho and cocky, it seems like an easy task, but like any Simon Says player knows, it’s surprisingly easy to trip up. So far, I’ve made it up to 16 perfect rounds before my memory peters out, but I’m working on higher recall.

How will you fare?

Well, Moodagent by Syntonetic , for one, definitely warrants a second look. It’s actually a little unfair to compare it to Pandora because they do two completely different things, albeit in the same manner. Moodagent creates playlists from your stock set of music based on “moods,” defined as sensual, tender, joy, and aggressive, along with a tempo to your liking, to keep your music fresh and continually exciting. What’s particularly great about this is all the music you have on your computer is, obviously, music you love – none of us would keep music on our computers or iPhones that we didn’t at some point actively seek out and purchase. I like to use Pandora for seeking out music I wouldn’t otherwise buy, or to introduce me to new groups and sounds that I probably would never come across. But, it’s true, whenever there’s a song (say, Electric Feel by MGMT – yes, I am a girl) that I just cannot absolutely live without, then I most assuredly will buy it. After that, it pretty much boils down to listening to my own collection of songs, of which I have hundreds, and siphoning them in some interesting way so I won’t listen to a straight down, in-alphabetical order, arrangement of songs that eventually gets stale. I, personally, couldn’t live without the shuffle feature on all my Mac products, but every now and then I’ll even skip a song or two if I’m not in the mood for it. Please, no more Fiona Apple – I only listened to all her albums a dozen times over during my entire High School years, and please, if I want to go dance crazy, I doubt Ryan Adams is going to get me there.

Here is where Moodagent comes in. Whatever songs I place on my iPhone are synced to Moodagent once I open the app. The app has a slick feel to it, with five bars along the top in colors, from left to right, of red, orange, yellow, purple and gray, representing, in order, sensual, tender, joy, aggressive, tempo, each of which is able to be slid up and down to different degrees of preference for that specific category. The higher up I slide sensual, say, the more songs Moodagent deems “sensual” will be placed in my playlist. If you want, you can tinker around with different slider settings, with differ play lists popping up – it’s pretty cool, to say the least.

Let’s say I want a playlist with plenty of sensuality and aggressiveness, but with the lowest settings on the other three. The first song that Moodagent picks, “Heartbeats” by The Knife, couldn’t be a more perfect fit. The synthesized, pseudo glam-rock feel to Heartbeats, with its slowly undulating beat and the pouty voice of the female lead singer just oozes sex, mystery, drama, allure, and flushing skin, a quickening heartbeat. It’d be a more sensual song without the funky synthesize beats, but it’s the, I guess you could say “aggressive” quality of this sound that places it at the top of this custom playlist. The next song in the mix is also a perfect match, “Hotel” by Broken Social Scene, with a similar low, sexy hum to its digitized, hipster beats. But, straying from the more synth type music the fourth song Moodagent picked was Dangerous by Kardinall Offishal (featuring Akon), which is definitely a sensual song with a raw, aggressive quality to it. More surprisingly, this song actually has a more upbeat tempo to it, but it maintains a smooth and curvy enough quality to it that it’s not necessarily upbeat. Were I to dance to it (and I do), it would involve a slow, sensual saunter with rocking hips than it would that frenetic hand waving we all do in bars late at night. Or, well, at least I do that. Hah.

“All I Need” by Radiohead also fit perfectly within the aforementioned scheme – are we noticing a trend yet? Let’s switch up the sliders, shall we? Let’s raise the tender to as high as possible, with a mid tempo, and the lowest setting for the rest. I’m suddenly inundated with a list of very moody, haunting songs from the likes of Sigur Ros, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (from the soundtrack of The Assassination of Jesse James), Sufjan Stevens, and Feist. Yep, that is definitely right on the mark. Let’s up the joy with mid-tenderness and mid-tempo. I now have a playlist of “Off Broadway” by Ryan Adams, “Impossible Germany” by Wilco, “Crazy on You” by Heart, “Alone in Kyoto” by Air, “Bad Dreams” by M. Ward, “Time of the Season” by The Zombies, and “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson. Definitely an eclectic mix, but does it fit the ticket? I certainly wouldn’t consider the majority of these songs joyful, by any definition of the word, but the beats they exhibit, the musical sensation, without a doubt have a joyful, upbeat bent to them. What if I raise all the sliders to the top? Well, the results turn out to be just as impressive. The first song, “Jerusalem” by Mirah is all at once sensual, tender, joyful and aggressive, with a sprightly tempo. Moodagent does have a surefire skill, through its technology, of achieving sensational playlists.

So, what about this technology? Moodagent’s developers say it:

“combines digital signal processing, music science and artificial intelligence to focus on the way music is perceived emotionally… Moodagent can play any song, no matter how obscure, without language barriers. Moodagent technology creates a profile for every song it encounters and stores it in an Amazon EC2 cloud. To create a profile, the song’s digital signal is analyzed, a segment (or segments) of the song is then amplified and run through 34 artificial intelligence expert systems, which are constantly trained by musicologists. Moodagent is able to create a song profile that measures the degree of each of the song’s characteristics, including moods, genres, sub-genres, styles, tempo/beat, vocals, instrumentation and production features.”

Gosh, no wonder the results are so impressive. I’m curious what the “34 artificial intelligence expert systems” are – as of now, it just sounds like something out of a sci-fi paperback. In any case, Moodagent seems to have the proper backing to create custom playlists ; whether you agree with the mood definitions or not. You might argue there should be more variety in the sliders, but considering the vast range of human emotions and moods, it’s best to keep Moodagent’s range winnowed to a small degree that encompasses a fairly wide variety of songs. It’s already impressed me with its ability to interpret songs based on perceptions of emotion, and I’ve enjoyed the 25 song playlists. What’s also great about Moodagent is the music keeps playing if you exit the app, so in that sense, it works just like the iPod function.

Give Moodagent a go next time you want to try out a new playlist making app for your iPhone – you may just find you’re in the mood for something new.

cover model Brooklyn Decker

In light of the recent controversy over the loss of certain scintillating, titillating apps in the iTunes app store, we rejoice over our continued access to the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition on the iPhone. It may seem odd that the Swimsuit edition is still available, given the picketing outrage of many a feminist, but compared to the more, dare I say sexual apps out there, the SI Swimsuit edition is downright vanilla. But, in all seriousness, looking at beautiful women in something as natural and breezy as a swimsuit, and especially when part of a well-known publication, is hardly something worth considering outrageous or anti-feminist. I hardly consider idolizing voluptuous women as something degrading and abhorrent. Besides, there’s a thing called Parental Control in case you don’t want Junior oogling over bikini-clad women at an early age. He has plenty more hormonal years ahead of him before he can give up the bike riding just yet.

But, back to the app. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2010 was recently released for the iPhone, as I mentioned when reviewing the Sports Illustrated app two weeks back. The app is free to download, for you to admire the likes of Brooklyn Decker, Jessica Gomes, Daniella Sarahyba, Irina Shayk, and, my personal favorite, Bar Rafaeli. Plenty of newcomers appear in this edition, along with newcomer actress Ashley Greene, of the now famous Twilight franchise. While free, the app is considerably limited in its photo and video albums, and in order to view more options, you must upgrade for a price. It’s too bad, considering GQ offers its entire publication for free, but I guess looking at beautiful women is an entirely different privilege. For the bare bones, dry minimum free download, you can view one photo and one video for each major model in the issue – in the upgraded, premium version, you are granted access to more videos, more photos, and the entire rookie model collection (new faces to the swimsuit modeling world). You also can read the models’ biographies, and pertinent information. For a mere $1.99 you can get 50 videos, photos of several Winter Olympians, some women from Dancing with the Stars, photos of Ana Ivanovic, and even a few famous soccer stars’ wives and girlfriends in body paint. How absolutely… scintillating.

It’s too bad the app, itself, isn’t terribly functional on the technical front. Sure, it’s easy enough to navigate, but a few simple measures could make it breezier to flow through, like the ability to swipe through photos, rather than exiting and tapping each photo individually. Really, what photo app

Jessica Gomes

doesn’t have a swiping ability? Other than that, the app is pretty basic: it’s meant for a younger demographic, of both men and women, who enjoy seeing models in swimsuits. It’s a famous, annual spread, and it’s usually a hugely anticipated event, one highlighted in magazines, blogs, and news sites – whether you consider it something worthwhile or not is entirely your own opinion. I think it’s fun, like looking through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, and I relish the fact that Sports Illustrated tends to choose models with a more natural, full figure, rather than the twiggy icons we see on catwalks. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with the latter, it’s just nice to see variety. Sure, models are models, and many women can choose to be nitpicky over their own or others’ perceived flaws, but it’s hard to argue with a magazine that showcases natural beauties, in next to nothing, with happy, radiant smiles, like the girl you’d find next door, or just frolicking on the beach. Almost like your best friend. So if you are one of those avid readers of Sports Illustrated, why not just buy the iPhone app, instead?