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Triposo
iPhone/iPad/Android/Web
Free
Triposo offers free travel guides for major cities around the world. They’re fairly in-depth, offering listings beyond the usual sections on hotels, restaurants, and shopping to explore nature trails, sporting facilities, camping grounds, local markets, and even the best places for coffee and cake.
A practical section includes metro maps, currency exchanges, health clinics, parking spots, and advice on getting a work permit if you need one. And there’s also a background section on history, culture, and even architecture.
All of this information has been pulled from online sources, such as Wikitravel and Facebook, but organized very well and packaged so that, once downloaded, you won’t need internet access to use them. The depth of information is so useful, it’s worth grabbing even if you only use it for the city you live in.
New for the IPad, it does suffer a glitch in the poor way is displays metro maps, something I hope an update will fix soon.
Atlas By Collins
iPhone/iPad
$6.99
What does the world look like if you compare internet usage by country? Atlas by Collins is a three-dimensional globe that behaves much like the physical globes you can playfully spin in schools, but the maps across its surface can change to display a variety of statistical information to visualize answers to a wide range of questions. Countries will change colour to show how heavy their internet usage is or to display changing birth rates or CO2 carbon emissions. If you want to narrow in on the information for a specific country or city, you can zoom down as a far as street level, just as you would on Google Maps.
The information is fetched from online sources to keep it updated and can be used by the app to create infographics and charts that offer more comparative analysis. It’s intended for schools and companies, but like a traditional atlas can be used by families looking to teach their kids that basics too.
There are seven virtual globes included at launch around the themes of politics, communication, the environment, energy use, population, and basic maps that offer satellite and geographical views.
Published by Harper Collins, the idea is to update the app with more globes that will expand into themes of climate, world economy, and UNESCO heritage sites. Although it seems like we’re overloaded with mapping apps these days, Atlas by Collins is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to get a sense of the world through statistical changes.
Hollywood Photobooth
iPhone/iPad
$0.99
The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England is currently holding an exhibition on some of Hollywood’s most iconic movie costumes. As you can imagine, the first impulse for anyone seeing these articles of clothes in real life is to want to try them on, so the museum has created this app to help you do just that.
They have scanned the costumes, creating highly detailed, virtual copies that you can then use to take photos of yourself wearing them. There’s Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp outfit from The Circus, Health Ledger’s cowboy gear from Brokeback Mountain, the royal dress Cate Blanchet wore as Queen Elizabeth I, and the Blues Brothers outfit Dan Akroyd wore as Elwood Blues, to name just a few.
All you have to do is have a friend point your camera at yourself and use the touchscreen controls to adjust the clothing for a better fit. This includes accessories such as hats, glasses, and canes. Each costume comes with an information card prepared by the museum’s curators.
It’s a simple, fun effect that works well. Other classic outfits featured include Marlene Dietrich in Angel and Morocco, Kim Novak in Vertigo, Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare In Love.