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Baby Lullaby

Snake is a video game that originated during the late 1970s in arcades and has maintained popularity since then, becoming something of a classic. After it became the standard pre-loaded game on Nokia phones in 1998, Snake found a massive audience.

Snake (video game) Wikipedia

The Bottom Line:

Help a hungry snake make its way around a plane to pick up fruits that appear at random positions.

The Good:

• Two different looks – Choose between two distinct looks: Old and New. Select Old if you’re a fan of the classic arcade game’s pixelated look, or select New if you’re looking to play a classic snake game that features more color and detailed graphics.
• Sneak peeks in the background – Whether you’re on the main or settings screen, a preview of the game is displayed in the background. The preview reflects the current game settings, so you know exactly how the game will look and feel before you play or as you tweak any of the game settings.
• Fun sounds and integration of phone’s current theme – The sound effects are very cute, and the app adopts the background themes and accent colors you select for your phone.
• Cost – It’s free*!

The Bad:

• Desultory instructions in the Help section – The instructions are too short and not very cohesive. The instructions could be more descriptive and better written.
• Faulty leaderboard – The leaderboard is available for only 24 hours, and it’s not very user-friendly. Unlike its web counterpart, the leaderboard players can access using this app doesn’t organize the stats according to the players’ currently selected levels. Another thing that’s disabled when you’re viewing the leaderboard is the scroll function: you can see your username and ranking, but you can’t scroll up or down to see your previous rankings or many other players’ info on the leaderboard.
• Room for improvement: Additional levels with slower snake – The lowest speed setting may not be easy to handle for some people. Kids and total newbies who want to play the game would really benefit from the addition of new levels with slower snakes.

The Ugly:

• We could not find anything ugly about this delightful app. If you discover something new or something that could be improved with this app, please leave a comment and we will consider adding it to this post.

The Amazing:

• Bordered or borderless planes – Make the game as difficult or easy as you want: Two different wall settings, Beam and Normal, are available. In Normal, you lose the game if your snake collides with the border, and in Beam, your snake can freely go through any of the borders.
• Very responsive controls – Regardless of what some reviews say, I found the controls very responsive and easy to use, which is very important for this type of game.

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Purity

Rabbit Run

Children who paint learn to think with an open mind, to look at situations creatively. They learn to express themselves more deeply through their art and their words. They’re able to take the lessons learned through painting and apply those skills to new situations. They develop critical-thinking skills and must make decisions about what works and what doesn’t on their own.

Melody Spier RaisingSmallSouls.com

The Bottom Line:

Toddler-friendly drawing app with a color picker right beside the canvas and easy settings to change the brush size and canvas color.

The Good:

• Thoughtful settings – The app has simple, thoughtful options that allow kids to easily clear the screen, toggle the canvas color, and adjust the brush size according to their artistic abilities.
• Ability to save the masterpiece – The app allows you to save your little one’s masterpiece to your phone so you can save it for prosperity or share it with the world.
• Free with ad support or paid without ads – This app has an ad-supported free version and an ad-free paid version, which in our opinion is totally worth it if your toddler likes to paint!

The Bad:

• No multi-touch support – Multi-touch support is a must in any toddler app. Unfortunately, Toddler Paint does not offer it, so painting can be difficult for little ones that don’t know how to hold the phone without touching the screen.
• Room for improvement: Color picker for parents to set up – It would be great if parents could choose the colors that go on each of the 10 spots in the color picker, as some kids prefer to use only certain colors. This, of course, would be something parents would have to adjust, just like the brush thickness.

The Ugly:

• We could not find anything ugly about this delightful app. If you discover something new or something that could be improved with this app, please leave a comment and we will consider adding it to this post.

The Amazing:

• Truly made for toddler – The developer was inspired by his son, and it is very obvious to us that he has designed this app for users 18 months to 3 years of age. The app is very simple to use and it provides all the necessary controls for very small children to allow them to just concentrate on painting, not on complicated settings.

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ScratchASketch

Train Crazy

BeauBeau Baby

Color Swipe

Much of mathematics teaching revolves around giving students practice in newly acquired skills and reinforcing and revisiting already introduced skills. Games provide a way of taking the drudgery out of this practice of skills, and making that practice more effective. A game can generate much more practice than a workbook page, ditto, or flashcards. When playing a game, students don’t mind repeating certain facts or procedures over and over.

Bonnie Adama mathgamesandactivities.com

The Bottom Line:

Select up to five numbers to combine with any of the four basic operations (+, -, x , ÷) so that they first numbers equal the last number.

The Good:

• Lots of customization options, levels & rewards – You can quickly set up the game sounds, minimize or maximize the game board size, and change the game’s difficulty level to Fun, Thinking, or Serious. Each level has unique features to suit the player’s ability (e.g., Fun offers hints every five seconds, Thinking offers a limited number of hints, and Serious offers no hints at all). Our favourite feature is the rewards available on Fun mode, which give extra points or time if you use difficult numbers in the problem, making the game challenging yet fun and encouraging.
• Great implementation of Metro design – This application follows Metro design principles in a delightful way. It’s refreshing to see games implementing the Metro design, as it provides a sense of familiarity to the users and makes it easier for them to navigate thru the app, given that they are familiar with Metro design conventions.
• Simple, clear instructions – The game is really straightforward and all the instructions are easy to understand, but in case you want to get all the details, there is a very helpful How to Play section that tells you everything you need to know.
• Quiet ad-support – No annoying pop-ups or poorly placed advertisements that disrupt your game. The developer did a really good job at keeping the app free without sacrificing gameplay quality.

The Bad:

• No multitasking support – The app does not tombstone properly, so if you’re in the middle of playing a game and you lock your phone, receive a call, or hit the Start screen button, you cannot pick up from where you left off and all your progress will be lost.
• Hard-to-read text in Light theme – Very similar tones of font and background colours can make it hard to read certain texts (e.g., option names in Settings). It’s not terrible, but it would be great if the app could support the Light theme better.

The Ugly:

• We could not find anything ugly about this delightful app. If you discover something new or something that could be improved with this app, please leave a comment and we will consider adding it to this post.

The Amazing:

• Excellent leaderboards – The app does a very good job at showing how your scores compare with those of other players from all over the world. You can also pick any flag/country to go with your profile, so even if your current location is not your country, you can represent your country in the leaderboards.
• All solutions available after each game – See other possible answers at the end of each game. The All Solutions page shows you all the different ways of making the correct solutions with the numbers that you were given, which can help you improve your math skills.

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Jack of Math

Twelvo!

A+ Math Frenzy

Quick Shift

Five Benefits of Text Messaging in Modern Society; Time Saver, More Minutes = More Money, Discretion, Not a Harsh Interruption, Talk ain’t cheap.

Joel West Educator, Texas

The Bottom Line:

Create shortcuts for sending text messages and e-mails in a flash.

The Good:

• Shortcut creation made quick and easy – Set up shortcuts for sending precomposed text messages and e-mails within seconds of starting the app. It takes only a few steps to define the message type and body, the recipient, and even the shortcut icon’s design and color.
• Very customizable shortcut icons – Choose from 15 different designs and colors for your shortcut icons. Customizing icons differentiates your shortcuts and helps you easily distinguish between one message and another.
• Professional design – The app is well made and appropriately simple, combining only the essential features that help you further simplify tasks. Interaction is also remarkably smooth, which sets the app apart from other static, run-of-the-mill apps.
• No risk – Free trial available.

The Bad:

• Icon color disabled in Live Tiles – You can create Live Tiles of your shortcuts and set the design and color of the shortcut icons, but only the icon design is shown on your start screen. You must, therefore, rely on the icon design to differentiate your shortcuts for the same person, which limits customization, or wait for the Live Tile animation to reveal a snippet of your text message or e-mail, which reduces the app’s efficiency.
• Contacts-only recipients – Messages and e-mails sent through this app are exclusive to people on your contacts list. You can’t send messages to numbers and e-mail addresses that are not saved to your phone.

The Ugly:

• We could not find anything ugly about this delightful app. If you discover something new or something that could be improved with this app, please leave a comment and we will consider adding it to this post.

The Amazing:

• Live Tile support – Pin shortcuts to the start screen. Creating Live Tiles of your shortcuts is also very quick and easy, and once a shortcut is pinned to the start screen, you’re only a tap away from sending an important precomposed text message or e-mail.

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Lightning Dial

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Jack of Math

Twelvo!

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Slurpy the Frog Free

FunPack

The bottom line is that money budgeting software can definitely give you the kind of assurance and control that you need to keep track of your expenses. In this way, you can be sure that all of your spending activities are based on reason and plan; and not just sheer indulgences.

Ajaero Tony Martins strategicbusinessteam.com

The Bottom Line:

Keep track of your finances including your accounts, balances, transactions and budgets

The Good:

• Powerful sorting feature – Organize your accounts and transactions exactly the way you want. You can easily sort your data (in either ascending or descending order) according to name, category, date, amount, and check number.
• Various balance modes – Choose among six available balance modes: Today Collected, Today Awaiting, Today Available, Final Collected, Final Awaiting, and Final Available. The different modes let you control how balances are displayed, and it’s easy to switch from one mode to another. You can instantly know how much money you currently have and will have in the bank, which is helpful if you want to make the best financial decisions.
• Customizable charts – Quickly toggle between bar and pie charts to visually represent your accounts and transactions. You can also filter graphical data by specifying the date (i.e., start and end spans), transaction type, transaction account, and transaction category.
• Cost – It’s free. Ads free!

The Bad:

• Default transaction type – Transactions are positive by default. While easy to do, changing the transaction type can be very repetitious or even cumbersome especially for people recording in a hurry or people using the app specifically to monitor their expenses.
• Slight lag on startup – The app is not as responsive as desired. You can set a default account to always start with, but you can’t do anything about random pages showing up on screen during startup. This isn’t a big deal if you don’t mind a startup delay of about three seconds, but seeing random pages on startup is irrelevant to the whole experience of using the app.
• Room for improvement: More user-friendly Budget section – The separate Budget section for recording all budget-related transactions is an impressive addition, but it could use some improvement. For example, budget types are also positive by default; this automatically makes all of your entries income targets instead of spending budgets, which could be very confusing if you don’t realize the difference between the two. Moreover, budgets can be added to only one category, and they must be created before the expenses because existing expenses don’t show when linked to newly created budgets.

The Ugly:

• We could not find anything ugly about this delightful app. If you discover something new or something that could be improved with this app, please leave a comment and we will consider adding it to this post.

The Amazing:

• Cloud storage with Google Docs – All your information can be imported from and exported to Google spreadsheets, so in case you can’t use your phone, the information you save in this app can always be accessed online.
• Great Metro design – The graphical design of this app matches your own phone’s theme. In addition, the user interface is very easy to navigate and a help section is always available if you ever get stuck along the way.

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ToyBank

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mazoocard LITE

BeauBeau Baby

Websites, books, your baby’s doctor, and other parents can all help as you figure out an appropriate schedule for your baby. But your child will be an important guide, and he’ll tell you what he needs – if you learn to read his cues.

Maureen Connolly babycenter.com

The Bottom Line:

Easy-to-use application for tracking baby’s daily activities, medical history, and more.

The Good:

• Comprehensive selection of daily activities – This app tracks all of your baby’s important activities/histories: feeding schedules (breast milk, formula, solid food), diaper changes, sleep patterns (naps, overnight), doctor visits, illnesses, vaccinations, allergies, and medications. It also helps nursing mothers monitor pumping sessions, making it easy to record the time and duration of pumping as well as the amount of milk expressed. Detailed reports, charts, and journals of all the information provided are automatically created for you.
• Different units of measurement available – Record data in imperial or metric units, and easily shift from one system to another whenever you need to. No manual conversion required!
• Multitasking on your phone made easy – The app flawlessly works in the background, so switching back and forth between apps is fine even as you record the duration of your child’s sleep or your breast-pumping session. Its Live Tile even shows a reminder that the timer’s running, which fully takes advantage of Windows Phone’s unique Start screen.
• Full-version trial for an entire week! – Unlike similar downloads on the Windows Phone App Store, this app allows you to try out all of its wonderful features for seven whole days, which is plenty of time for parents to determine whether it’s worth buying or not. In our opinion, it’s totally worth it!

The Bad:

• Very basic Medicine Cabinet feature - The app does a great job recording drug names and expiration dates, but it would be even better if it could also record the required dosage, frequency, and duration or allow parents to set up alarms that help them remember when they should administer medications to their children.
• Missing labels in Activity Summary when Light background theme is selected - The app’s useful Activity Summary gives you a quick overview of all your recorded activities; however, when your phone’s background is set to Light, it’s impossible to distinguish which columns are for which activity, as labels are nowhere to be found on the report, which can be very confusing for new users.
• Room for improvement: Option to print reports and pin activities to the Start screen - It would be great if users can pin their favourite activities to the Start screen, specially for users that focus on only one or two particular activities. It would also be nice if the detailed reports could be printed out to give to doctors or anybody else that needs to know the child’s history, schedules, etc.

The Ugly:

• We could not find anything ugly about this delightful app. If you discover something new or something that could be improved with this app, please leave a comment and we will consider adding it to this post.

The Amazing:

• Easy sign-up and overall user-friendliness – You need to create an account to use the app, but you can simply sign in with your Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo, or Facebook account instead of having to come up with a new username and password. You can also create multiple profiles if you have more than one child, and when creating a profile, you can enter just the information you have handy—no required fields to fill out. The app makes signing up as painless as possible and even guides you through the process with helpful pop-ups!
• Automatic backup and synchronization – The most remarkable thing about this app is it backs up and synchronizes your data across other Windows Phone devices. This means that other people, such as your spouse, can stay updated on your child’s day-to-day activities simply by accessing the same account and that you can format your Windows Phone whenever you need to without losing your data.

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