It doesn’t take an esteemed leader in alternative medicine to convince people that Yoga is helpful for many things, such as weight loss, relaxation, general fitness and health. But, it’s not always easy to fit a yoga class into your schedule, and unless you have a Yoga for the People studio nearby, there’s usually a hefty fee to pay before embarking on your physical and mental wellbeing (try upwards of $13 per class in the Bay Area).  To assist you in those times when you’d like a studio session, but cannot, for one reason or another, be present in one, Authentic Yoga acts like a personalized collection of yoga videos. It can serve as both an introduction to yoga for the beginner or as a convenient tool to help the busy person enjoy something resembling a class, without actually having to attend one. Those who travel frequently will appreciate the flexibility and professionalism of this app, and I definitely consider it my go-to yoga app from now on.

Dr. Chopra is featured in several videos in the Understand Yoga section. In these, Deepak briefly mentions other types of yoga before explaining that Authentic Yoga focuses primarily on Raja yoga, a branch of yoga that focuses heavily, if not entirely, on meditation (this app is a combination of Hatha/Raja styles). Other main sections of Authentic Yoga include Learn to Practice, Yoga Routines, and Review Poses. The best part about the Learn to Practice section is not only does it teach basic yoga poses and positions, but it identifies poses for specific ailments like tight hamstrings, tight hips, or for building balance, decreasing stress, and more. Yoga Routines are divided between beginner, intermediate, and advanced and include routines for balance, flexibility, strength, body awareness, and even Deepak’s personal awareness routine. You can rate each routine on both difficulty and your personal enjoyment to keep track of which routines you use frequently and which ones you use only intermittently. You can also follow routines in their entirety or select specific poses. Each routine includes pictures and a video of Tara performing the poses to music, with Deepak offering instruction in the background, along with an explanation for the sequence. In addition, you can become a part of the Authentic Yoga community and send questions to Deepak and Tara directly from the app.

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.

French Women Don’t Get Fat, The Okinawa Diet, The China Study, Dr. Atkin’s New Diet Revolution, and The Best Life Diet are but a few of the the most notable diet books from the last decade, each one acclaimed in its own right, each one later lambasted, and each heavily featured on various bestseller lists. Anyone can argue that one such diet will make you lose weight rapidly, but that another is better for your heart, that this other diet will give you the clearest complexion, but no one can truly say that one diet is better, overall, than another – or, at least, not any one of the modernized diets we see lining our bookshelves today. Many physicians today agree that some generalized form of a Mediterranean diet is the healthiest one to subsist on, if we define healthy in terms of a localized population with a low incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and a host of other modern conditions. The principal aspects of this diet include a high consumption of olive oil, legumes, grains, fruits, and vegetables; a moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt), wine and fish; and a low consumption of meat and meat products. Of course, dietary jargon like moderate consumption often fall on deaf ears – how do we define moderate? Everything, after all, both diet and people, is relative to one’s own health and experience. Dietary factors, really, are only part of the reason for the health benefits enjoyed by these cultures – genetics, lifestyle (notably heavy physical labor), and environment are also involved. The putative benefits of the Mediterranean diet for cardiovascular health are primarily correlative in nature: while they reflect a very real disparity in the geographic incidence of heart disease, identifying the causal determinant of this disparity has proven difficult. Here is where my dad would pump a fist in the air and exclaim, with all the enthusiasm of a closet theorist, the correlation between cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, and Vitamin D.

One diet book bestseller that has been captivating people around the country doesn’t so much advocate a diet, in the traditional sense, as it advocates a simple substitution method when eating out. Their motto? Eat This, Not That! Rather than require readers to plow through literature on why certain foods are better than others, or vaguely telling readers to eat only moderate amounts of something, Eat This Not That instead takes a visual approach, inundating readers with pictures of food commonly eaten at fast food establishments, or during holidays, common snacks, breakfasts and more. The idea of the book, and its recently released app by Men’s Health Magazine, is to familiarize people with the concept of which foods are healthier – mind you, on a modest scale – than others of seemingly equal caloric value. If anything, the idea is pared down to the simple, but everlastingly true dogma of “calories in, calories out” – if you eat less, you will weigh less. Obviously, this isn’t a diet book that focuses on health, per se; if it were, then it wouldn’t advocate eating at fast food establishments. The meal substitution principle is a good one, though, because many people do dine at these establishment on a frequent basis, and if you can’t deter them from eating there, you may as well steer them toward the better choices.

The Eat This Not That app takes the visual principle a step further by plugging it into a game – a transportable one, at that. I’ve often lamented at how little people read, but the fact of the matter is people are highly visual creatures – when it comes to diet books, or recognizing portions and alternate food options, images are key. There won’t always be nutritional information available for everything you eat, and even with the caloric information now required by law for many places, there’s still no solid verification that people will always be interested, or patient enough to read this information and make better choices. With the Eat This Not That game, users will slowly become adept at recognizing which foods offer them the best bang for their health; they’ll learn, along the way, that mashed potatoes, while heavy in their own right with cream and butter, still make a more well-rounded choice than a slice of sweet potato pie. A shortbread cookie, while smaller in size, and seemingly innocuous and unassuming, has nearly three times the saturated fat of a chocolate raspberry brownie, which clocks in a modest 5 grams with 370 calories. The game presents you with two images, and you must decide, based on appearances alone, which is the better choice based on potential levels of saturated fat, sodium, and calories. As the clock ticks down, nutritional info starts popping up, to help you make a more informed choice, but you’re only docked points if you play in the speed round.

Yikes, the calories.

Many of the foods contained within this game are establishment-specific, like a Wendy’s Frosty or a Double Whopper with Cheese and Fries from Burger King. The game is particularly exceptional in this regard, for sorting out the caloric, sodium, and saturated fat values for these foods because I, personally, find it very difficult to weigh my options at these places. A burger is a burger, to me, so how do I know which one actually has four times the amount of already catastrophic sodium… and why? It never ceases to amaze me the disparity in calories and fat between two, seemingly identical entrees. Other foods featured in the game, however, are a bit more vague in origin, labeled simply as “slice of pumpkin pie” or a “blueberry cheesecake.” A blueberry cheesecake from Lindy’s in New York may very well be a heart attack on a plate, but not all cheesecakes are made in the same ilk. Portion sizes, too, remain vague in the slice arena. A quarter of a pie slice of pumpkin pie could very well rival a small slice of cheesecake; of course, this is making the argument against standard pie slice sizes, which frankly, I’m sure most people are unaware. Some choices make me scratch my head, it being completely obvious to anyone which is the healthier choice, but then I have to remember the general state of the nation: we’re obese, on a cattle scale, and most people probably will choose that deep-fried crab cake with 19 grams of fat and 300 calories over the 12 shrimp cocktail with sauce, averaging around 165 calories and zero fat. Sometimes, you just want that turducken.

Regardless of personal choices, Eat This Not That is a host of information on things we really don’t want to know about. The true success of this game, and book, lies in the scare tactic when users realize, with horror, that a salad from Wendy’s, with all its innocent iceburg lettuce, can range up to 700 calories, making a burger the unforeseen better choice. It may not be a revolutionary diet plan, and it may not be the most accurate in its representation, but it does fascinate you (albeit in a somewhat horrific and masochistic way) into making wiser decisions… and for a nation that scares itself silly over trite, inconsequential things, that isn’t a bad thing at all.

There once was a girl named Jackie, who watered her plants til they were tacky. She stayed up all night, feeling something wasn’t right, and thought to herself, “I wonder if they get too much light?” It wasn’t very clear, no, not at all, why her plants shed such a tear, and Jackie was blubbery, amiss, giving those dear plants a kiss, knowing all too well, her plants were in certain hell. Even with oxygen and water, her plants simply fought her, and indeed came her fright, when her plants died that very night.

Point of the story? I’m a terrible gardener, and, apparently, a terrible poet. I received my first potted plant as a gift from my boyfriend in High School, who felt a beautiful white orchid with lovely, purple stamens could soothe my post-wisdom teeth agony, and I suppose, appeal to my womanly sentiments  – he always did have good taste. More formally known as a Phalaenopsis, it was planted in a green ceramic pot with pretty lattice patterns, and held the most wondrous bloom: wide open, like a billowy cloud but with a ghostly expanse to its every tendril. I still have the pot – it rests in companionship with other pots on my front porch – but unfortunately, no plant has taken residence in its pretty seat since the day that orchid died. Maybe I’m sentimental, and felt that no other plant deserved the place of that flower, but it’s also a matter of my green thumb – I do not have one. Plenty of pink ones, ones that hold pens and can cook, bake amazing desserts, but none that bear even the remotest ability to plant something, and not have it wither and die. Orchids, in particular, are a fussy species, often blooming but once a year, and require stringent limitations on the amount of water and light, even dryness to the air (they love humidity). The reason why my blooms never returned? Nitrogen deficiency, a common reason why plants fail to bloom year after year despite, otherwise, remaining green and healthy. Time after time, I’ve purchased plants, only to see a jungle of green appear around me, with no other color in sight.

uFlowers by NIX Solutions may just be the answer. Obviously, for anyone with an innate talent for gardening, or for someone who actively seeks knowledge on plants, maintaining healthy plants and flowers may be an an easy task – frivolous even. But, for someone like me, who enjoys pretty flowers, for aesthetic and scent purposes, but who has absolutely no concrete knowledge in plants and doesn’t have the patience to research it on her own, uFlowers is an excellent resource for the iPhone. The app contains a catalogue of plants, each plant listing bearing such pertinent information as the Latin name, its origin, a brief but complete description, and excellent details on how to properly care for the plant, including timetables for watering, proper temperature, optimal light, what soil to use and when to fertilize. It’s very thorough, but still a bit incomplete: the whole app only lists about 70 plants, but these cover the most widely used and loved plants in this country, so perhaps it’s not that limiting at all.

Using uFlowers, I was finally able to decipher what plants I have in my conservatory. The place I moved into recently has a good-sized conservatory, with red brick planters running the entire perimeter like a massive baseboard, all bearing these monstrous, almost Jurassic-looking plants with giant, rubbery leaves, and stems the size of my arm. The plants, apparently, are called the Swiss Cheese Plant (Latin name, appropriately, Monstera deliciosa), and hail from Mexico. They can reach upwards of 10 feet in height (wow), and their leaves, it seems, can cause such severe skin irritation that uFlower recommends using gloves to handle them. This is extremely good to know because when my skin comes in contact with poison oak, the ensuing outbreak resembles second degree burns – I’m definitely wary of any plant with potential irritants.

I’m glad, though, that I now have a handy reference on how to take care of this beastly plant. It requires bright light, but no direct sun; a temperature between 65 and 85 degrees; peat moss soil mixed with sand or perlite for good drainage (drainage is important since it’s a drought-tolerant species); watering may be done sporadically, allowing the top one inch of soil to dry in between waterings; spraying of the leaves may be done every two days for normal room humidity; and fertilizing may be done every two weeks, spring through fall, and monthly in the winter. To better plan my plant healthcare schedule, uFlower allows you to save plants under “My Flowers” and then organizes the watering, fertilizing, and other schedules into a calendar. Small thumbnails of your plants are shown beneath the Calendar, and markers show up on each calendar day to represent however many tasks you have for that day – plant-related, of course. To ascertain more specifically what you have to do on a specific day, tap the To-Do tab at the bottom of the screen, and all your tasks will be laid out neatly for you – for today, 4/14/2010, I must water, spray and fertilize my Swiss Cheese Plant. Thankfully, after today’s run, I won’t have to do anything until 4/18, when I must spray its leaves. You can sync this information with your email and desktop calendar (for the extra fastidious), and you even have the option of sound notifications, and further customizations in the form of adding your own plants or flowers to the catalogue. I wish it was a little easier on the eyes sometimes, and maybe a bit more intuitive on the controls, but for what it does, I’m not complaining much. Though, I have to admit – it does seem like an awful lot of watering for the Swiss Cheese Plant when I know it’s done very well, all its own, without anyone watering it, for a good two months.

Before uFlowers, I definitely swayed toward the minimalist approach to plants: buy cacti. It does make sense in California, though, without being too much of a cop-out, lackadaisical approach to gardening – we are a drought state, and drought-friendly plants not only help the environment by being more indigenous, but help out the green thumbless in the garden department. But, now that I have an excellent guide to preen my feathers, stroke my self-confidence, I can tell you, with the utmost assurance, that I will begin foraying into the more treacherous tendrils of orchids, azaleas, roses, tulips and more.

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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.

Foodictionary isn’t quite what I thought it would be, or at least, what my holier-than-thou, presumptuous nature concocted from the sugar-crusted ravages of my foodie mind. I should have taken a cue from the developer, who describes the app as, “a translation software for food and beverage terminology.” Wow, I don’t believe I’ve ever read something so… what’s the word? Hermetic. Exacting. Cold and calculating, but not of the cold meat variety. It’s definitely not of the jargon I would expect from most foodies, which is the demographic this app is most likely to cater to (ba dum crash). In essence, foodictionary is simply that: a compound word merging food and dictionary. It should be taken at face value: it’s just a dictionary of foods, translated into several different languages of your choice. This isn’t all bad – to the frequent traveler, it’s good to be able to translate what you see on the menu with a handy app. Many of us aren’t fluent in our destination’s tongue, and even if we are, sometimes we don’t know all the specific words and spices and unique fish, flavors, etc that can often be exhibited in a menu. Just in case you feel like trying the Testa in Florence, it’s wise to either consult someone proficient in the language, or this app. Both will tell you, with all the ease of a straight answer, that Testa is pork head. Hey, I’d try it, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to.

In terms of consulting, Foodictionary, at least, really delivers. My first impression, actually, was “Holy Sh**” because the thoroughness of all the lists and the categories, is just so overwhelming. It’s a massive compendium of many different kinds of food, covering more than 12,500 terms per language. It supports 7 languages – English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Greek – with more than 87,500 translated terms in total. I’m still reeling a bit over those numbers – who had the time to do all this? I suppose that’s beside the point, but another pressing question I have is why is Greek included, but no dialect of Chinese? I’m sure more languages will be included in future updates.

The main thing that impressed me wasn’t merely the sheer volume of items, but the attention to specifications. Under the Italian listings, there were several phrases for anchovy, regarding plain, regular anchovies, anchovies of the north Atlantic, anchovies in lemon and olive oil, anchovies with tomato, and anchovies with straight up olive oil. It’s interesting noting these specifications not just for the range of options, but it reflects on the food culture of that language, itself – the Italians must eat a good deal of anchovies for there to be such specific ways of eating them. The Inuit, because their environment was snow, had over 300 words for snow, alone. In a way, this app is an interesting, pseudo-ethnographic study on how language reflects cultural ideas.

Two button tabs at the bottom of the screen let you switch the languages and the order of translation, so you may have items listed in English and translated into Spanish, or listed in Spanish and translated into English, or the same thing using the app’s given languages at your disposal. It’s all very interesting, and quaint – despite all enormity – to have this comprehensive collection of food items in one app. It’s not terribly easy to sort through, and it’s rather dull to look at, which makes me wonder if anyone would use this app, at all? I admit it’s very impressive (my reaction above still stands), but for apps to survive for longer than a week in the App Store, they better be nice to look at, or so well-designed that navigating them is a breeze. But, even if Foodictionary possessed those two things, I’m still not sure it’d last long enough for people to appreciate what it has to offer.

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Soho may be one of the premiere, chic shopping destinations of New York, rife with what I deem a hoity-toity air, a slowly wavering art scene, and a street-walking population of girls is the latest Citizens of Humanity skinny jeans, bug-eyed Prada glasses, oversized leather bags, and cone-shaped, red-lacquered Christian Louboutin heels – or, now that it’s spring, sky high

Plenty of categories to rifle through...

wedge platform that turn someone of my stature, 5′9, to right around 6′1. Soho definitely has its own flair, as does any neighborhood of Manhattan, and Midtown is no exception. Midtown isn’t a neighborhood, per se, but more a collection of neighborhoods, like Chelsea, Gramercy and Hell’s Kitchen, to name a few of the more familiar ones, and it encompasses a vast area, ranging from between 14th Street and 59th Street, from the Hudson River to the East River, at about five square miles or 12 km total. The core of Midtown Manhattan is from about 31st Street to 59th Street between Third and Ninth avenues, about two square miles – this is the area most commonly referred to as “Midtown” and is where the famous Times Square is located.  All in all, midtown denotes any area not labeled as “uptown” or “downtown,” and it carries a very symbolic New York essence to it, representing – if you will – the very heart of New York with iconic places like the Empire State Building, the Museum of Modern Art, Madison Square Garden, the New York Public Library, Penn Station, Carnegie Hall, the Plaza Hotel, Madison Avenue, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and much, much more. The New York you see heralded in film was most likely shot in some area of Midtown.

... and 3D maps to boot.

What MIDTOWNinmypocket does is assist you with finding your way around the giant epicenter that is Midtown, by carefully recording every single worthwhile place to see, shop, eat, sleep, lounge, or otherwise engage in mundane tasks (banks, churches), all in painstakingly organized categories and mapped locations. The app is designed in exactly the same manner as SOHOinmypocket – right down to the chic, Parisian-looking girl with giant, white framed spectacles -  with the option to either sort through categories to find something specific, or by browsing the map for your current location to see what’s nearby. Any mapped location may be tapped to view further information, and pertinent things like address, telephone, hours, and such are given for each place. When viewing a mapped location, you may also tap the “go” button, for your ease, so the app can navigate you there from your current location.

It’s astonishing, actually, the precision of MIDTOWNinmypocket (as well as SOHOinmypocket). The only downside to this app is the map loading time can be slow, but it’s noticeably faster on the 3GS model – it’s not that big of a deal, anyway. It turns out the developer will be releasing a SANFRANCISCOinmypocket soon, which I absolutely cannot wait for – San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general is where Appstruck is based, and I’m always looking for excellent guides to the area. Even if you’re a native, or at least, a long-term resident, there’s always the chance you’ll be surprised at what a guide can tell you.

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Being a writer, myself, or at least, an aspiring one, I can attest to the difficulty inherent in the creative process. Sometimes, it’s an absolute breeze – words, characters, and premises are not so much grasped as fully grabbed, easily plucked from the clutches of your right cerebral cortex to be laid out, resplendent on paper. And, other times, it’s a sad practice in futile desperation, gasping for air when there is no air at all, and mustering what little of your confused sensibilities you have to jigsaw a ragged piece – this is where cliches, and refurbished ideas come into play, the Thomas Kincaid of the writing artform. At the risk of sounding hackneyed and cliched, writing is all too similar to running. There is a state of zen achieved when everything glides smoothly, with hardly any thinking at all, a rhythmic, perfectly sustainable motion. It, plain and simple, just is. Runners, when at their finest, feel a surge of energy they reign in, their endorphins racing, and their concentration wanes in favor of relaxation, dreaminess, an enjoyment of being privy to that state of perfect, almost accidental balance. In that perfectly honed moment of writing, ideas are strangely orderly, and decoded too quickly for the fingers to type, the writer finding himself in a sustained state of mental clarity, alertness, of keeping up, a transcriber to his very lucid thoughts.

Of course, I wouldn’t be a writer if I claimed that all good writing is born from those moments of sheer clarity – which, frankly, aren’t that rare at all for the good writers (the Imaginagicians, as I call them). Writing, like any artform, is also a craft, and whatever skills or talents you bring to the table must be carefully honed and winnowed, cut to a precise, sharp edge. Writing, and its close cohort, reading, are nurtured from a very early age, so in many ways any one person’s talent in writing is set in stone based on these early practices. Well, maybe not stone, but certainly a thick, drying mud, or quicksand – writing can certainly be malleable. Of course, being able to weave a good sentence is far different from being able to create an original idea, of being able to create characters and bring them to life. And yet, the two ideas are inextricably entwined.

What I Need A Muse fails to realize is that the creative process cannot be undone from the act of writing, itself. I Need A Muse may be able to create an interesting, even unique character name for you, and attach it to a slightly eccentric job title, but since you took no part in that process, you miss out on that vital link of emotional resonance. You did not create this character. You did not conduct research or search your local environment for inspiration, from cafes, markets, or from that frumpy woman who rocks in her porch chair every morning, but is seen no where else.  You did not write this character, or decide that he was “surly.” Creative Writing classes will often give its students writing prompts, perhaps even of brief, character sketches, to incite students to nurture that creative spark. But, what I Need A Muse presents is a stark, robotic character, pumped out by a digital machine. Sure, a name here or there might be useful, but what would you write about for Aaron Cruz, a quiet Cashier working in Douglas Memorial Park?

I don’t know, either.

Plenty 'o' apps.

I actually thought Appzilla was going to be a collection of games, much like another app I reviewed that reminded me of those old Atari game packages you could buy. I was a little disappointed when I realized it wasn’t 50 games in one, but I got over that pretty quickly when I saw the apps Appzilla has to offer. In the past I’ve reviewed a currency converter, a price calculator (which deal is the better one), a password app, a tip calculator, and various others, all of which are contained within Appzilla. These apps are the kind that are useful to have on hand, but not necessarily the kind of app you would actively seek out, much less buy – if you have it, great, if you don’t, well, then you’re plumb out of luck. There have been a few occasions where I needed a level and thought of the level app for the iPhone (my boyfriend has it on his iPhone – as it turns out, it’s off by nearly a whole degree), but it’s never spurred me enough to actually download the app. With Appzilla, however, people may be more prompted to download it because it offers three whole pages of apps that you can hide away in one icon, without painstakingly downloading each one as the occasion calls for it. The

Protractor

flashlight, dictionary, level, password creator, price calculator, sale price finder, ruler, tip calculator, unit calculator, and translator are the most useful apps in Appzilla, and the ones I think, most people could reap the most benefit. Sure, some of them have their problems: the ruler isn’t anywhere near long enough, and scrolling to see more inches seems theoretically suitable, but in reality, doesn’t work that well, and the translator isn’t top-notch – but then again, what free translator is? The others work just fine – I get the most use out of the unit calculator, with all the baking I do. I would include the cook timer in this list, but it doesn’t work if you exit the app, so what’s the point? The grill time, too, is silly, because it’s an exact clone of the cook timer.

For every useful app, though, there is a completely useless one, almost thrown in there for kicks, or to round out the number to 50. A buzzer app shows just a red and green buzzer for those times when you want to hold a round of Jeopardy in your living room. It’s quirky and enough to crack a quick smirk, but the novelty dies within seconds (it doesn’t help that the buzzer sounds latently). The Booklamp may as well be the

Dictionary

Flashlight, the Grill Timer and the Cook Timer are the same, a coin flip provides momentary amusement for those times when, curiously enough, you don’t have a coin on you, and a clock app really takes the cake by, gasp, giving you the time. I was rather tickled by a few of the apps that were clever enough to strike my interest, but I would never find the opportunity to use them, apps like the Clinometer, Decibels reader (I suppose I could use this when arguing with someone, showing her that she’s way beyond raising her voice and is now just yelling), the Metronome, Plumb Bob, Protractor, and Tally. Seriously, who uses a Protractor? The Strobe app just flashes blinding white light at you, enough to incite seizures, and the Lighter just shows a burning flame. Really? A lighter? The Massager app turns on annoying beats of vibration, the Trip Wire registers sounds and then sounds an alarm, and I can’t even figure out what the Teslameter is supposed to do, other than the

Buzzer

disclaimer that notes, “This device does not have the ability to measure magnetic fields.” And I thought the iPhone could do everything.

The Auto Camera, at first, seemed like it offered something useful for the iPhone’s much neglected camera, but then I realized a timer wasn’t included in the iPhone for a reason. Unless you prop your iPhone against something carefully, or sandwich it in between two books, you’ll be taking a lot of pictures of your ceiling, 10 seconds after scheduling the camera to shoot. Not exactly the greatest idea. I was really miffed, however, at seeing a Homeland Security app – do I really need to be reminded of this preposterous labeling system? Oh, and are we still on yellow, meaning Elevated risk of terrorist attacks? This is an app I could do without.

Appzilla could be better presented, and have more worthwhile apps, or, heck, even just a reduction to 30, because there are certainly 20 apps in there I could do without. But, I’ll continue to make the argument that having a package deal on a dozen or so apps that you would find useful should the situation arise, makes Appzilla a good app to invest in. Besides, it’s only $0.99 and takes one meager slot on your iPhone page. Who can argue with that?

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.