Timeline WW1 with Dan Snow
Free/$9.99
It’s like pulling moments and memories from out of a well-packed chest. TV presenter and researcher Dan Snow has organized a wealth of archival films, photos, and journals into a timeline that may start out chronological, but thanks to many layers allows you to dive and explore the material at your own pace.
You get to decide how the material is laid out before you. You can have it focus on a specific year, month, or day. You can choose to see material based on nationality, theme, influential people, or campaigns. You can bring out just the films or photo galleries, with each filter you apply, you can still travel through the events of the war.
Selecting items will zoom them and some will open to reveal photographs attached. Many have narration from Dan Snow, while others will take you to a globe filled with animated battle maps. My favourite touch is the inclusion of present day veterans to perform readings of journals and poems by World War soldiers.
Timeline manages to deliver a fresh take on the first World War which isn’t easy given the multitude of documentaries and books already out there. No matter how familiar you may be with the history, I think this app has new discoveries waiting for you.
Chefs Feed
Free
Whether it’s an appreciation of the craft, a burning jealousy, or simply a love of good food, chefs will never forget a great meal prepared by someone else. When that happens, they can use Chefs Feed to share their discovery with the rest of us. The social recommendation network lets them post tweet-styled enthusiastic comments whenever the impulse takes them, and then the app organizes that information into a directory of meals and restaurants you can quickly search through based on location or type of dish.
Like a social network you can “follow” chefs and be notified whenever they post new comments. You can “like” their entries and even respond with your own comments. The app lets you keep track of the dishes you’ve had and the ones you’re looking to try. Participation from the restaurant world is pretty impressive, with top chefs from twenty-one North American cities keeping active in the network.
The motivation for chefs to work together on this and to keep it from becoming a mutual appreciation society is their need to offer an alternative to Yelp and other services that have come mired with complaints. The focus on specific dishes over general reviews of restaurants is helpful as we’re really looking for something good to eat rather than somewhere.
Tiny Thief
$3.99
Tiny Thief is so strong in character and story that you could remove its game elements and it would still survive as a captivating cartoon series. The thief himself is a little boy who travels the countryside with his weasel companion, freeing those who have become pinned by dastardly villains while pocketing treasures for himself as payment. That he does this with all the bravado and physical sneakiness of a grown-up Robin Hood, slipping into castles and pirate ships to use the owner’s belongings and guards against them, is what gives the game its charm.
The puzzle is in figuring out how to help the Tiny Thief put his improvised plans in motion. Tapping a dinner bell can divert kitchen staff while he steals a key. A fishing rod might give him just the right tool to snatch a needed item from under a guard’s nose. You can recruit animals to your cause and trick others into helping you, but it all has to be done when no one’s looking. The sneaky timing of it all provides a lot of situational humour, as you often dash into wherever’s nearby by to hide. In one level the thief slips into a woman’s bed to hide and it works because she thinks he’s her husband.
Angry Bird makers Rovio are the publishers and so Tiny Thief has a familiar star rating system for puzzle solutions, where each scene includes a main task and then extra hidden objects to try for when you play the game again. Despite an impressive number of levels, there’s no sense of repetition or lack of inventiveness.
Tiny Thief is one of the mobile games I’ve played and it’s straight price of $4 (no in-app purchases here) also makes it one of the best values too.
