Marktopia

This week I have decided to make a few picks for the iPhone/iPod Touch.  I have been avoiding doing these since I didn’t want to bog down the picks of the week with a bunch of apps people might not be able to use.  But there are some good apps out there, so I thought I would share some of my picks (all free apps):

Lux Touch - I love Risk and this is a great 5 minute version where you play computer opponents.  The controls are intuitive using touching countries to perform the attacks.

Instapaper - The biggest issue with reading articles in the iPod Touch is that you have to be in a wifi area to load up the article.  Instapaper allows you to save articles to read later from your desktop browser, and then the iPhone app allows you to download it for offline reading.

Pocketpedia - If you are a fan of the Bruji Pedia apps, this is a great addition.  You can sync with the desktop versions to get all of your stuff on your mobile device.  You can also make collections that live on the device exclusively.

Trace - A clever game that is kinda like Lemmings, but instead of using tools to work your way though the level, you use your finger to draw a path to walk on.

Rebekah and I have been tossing around a shared movie database where we could keep track of the movies we have, what we have watched, and an easy way to pick a movie to watch.  After some planning, it was going to be an elaborate web database project.  Thinking that would take a fair amount of time, I investigated a program that might be able to handle this already and stumbled upon DVDPedia from Bruji.  For 18 bucks, you get searching and importing data from the web, a customizable interface and smart folders to make that list of romance movies under 90 minutes.  As a bonus, Bruji also released a free app for the iPhone called PocketPedia that does the same stuff and can sync with the desktop application.  If you are trying to organize stuff and maxed out the usefulness of the Amazon Media Collection, I would recommend checking this out.