It’s the freakin’ weekend everybody, and you know what that means! It’s time for another Apps of the Week roundup. This might be my favorite of the year thus far, with a unique flashcard app, a calendar app built around how humans think, and the long-awaited version 2 release of my favorite todo app. And as always, we’ve selected a fun game for you to check out.
Memoru
Here is a cool-looking app that wants to help you learn new…stuff. It’s called Memoru, and it’s a digital flashcard app with a fun retro-modern UI and various quiz modes so you can immerse yourself in any subject, any time. We’ve covered plenty of flashcard apps over the years, but I don’t recall any of them looking like this, or offering any of these features. Memoru has two different flashcard modes, Insane and Lame, and three different quiz types—matching, multiple choice, and text. I don’t necessarily have anything coming up I need to study for, but I’ll be damned if I don’t come up with a reason to use this app. Perhaps, Simpsons trivia?
HEY Calendar
Basecamp, the team behind the popular project management software, and more recently the HEY Email app, is back with another revelation. It’s called HEY Calendar, and it’s meant to change the way we do…calendar-ing. Here’s a quote from the app’s description: “people think in days and weeks, not months. What’s tomorrow? Later this week? Next week? The HEY Calendar is built around how you think, not how paper calendars were designed.” You also get habit tracking, event circling, countdowns, and much more. Just a heads up, the early reviews complain of bugs and other issues that typically come with version 1.0 of an ambitious app like this, but HEY, if you’re ok with that, have at it.
Clear Lists 2
Wow. Where do I even begin? I’ve been using Clear as my main(ish) todo list app for nearly a decade. I may have operated without it for long stretches of time, but I always came back to it, and in fact it’s sitting on my Home Screen as we speak. There’s just something magical about an app that is so simple to use—pull down to create a list or add an item to a list, swipe left to delete an item or swipe right to mark it completed, and pinch to go back to the previous menu. You can also add an alarm/reminder to a todo list item, and there are custom themes, icons, sounds, and fonts to collect. Version 2 seems more fluid and bouncy, with some subtle new features, but it largely feels like reuniting with an old friend that has had a bit of a glow up.
NothingDoor
It’s amazing how broad the spectrum is for entertainment. On one hand I could play an action-packed 3D racing game or an FPS shooter, with cutting edge graphics, against hundreds of people online, or I could play this 1-bit puzzle game and stare at very basic black and white graphics and text. Games, amirite? Anyway this is NothingDoor, a clever retro-inspired puzzler where winning means destroying everything, living or undead. In it you must think ahead and plan your moves carefully, because if you fail, you’re trapped…forever. There are 40 mind-bending levels to play through, and 3 big bosses to beat. To be honest, this is one of those games you won’t know if you’ll like it until you try it out, and since it’s free during this limited-time launch window, it’s certainly worth giving a shot.