Top Twenty-Four Apps.

In the spirit of giving at Christmas, we are giving you the gift of the top twenty-four apps all in one little list.  We know... you're welcome.  You should know, though, that there was no way we were going to spend Christmas day typing a blog post (even for you), so we actually typed this last week (twice, if you need to know- we deleted the first one... nice.  Ya, we were pretty happy about that.).  So, you ask, how did we type it last week and have it post on Christmas?  Did we get up at the crack of dawn Christmas morning, rush to the computer, and hit the "publish" button?  Did we hire elves?  Did we actually type it on Christmas after all (you know, third time's a charm)?  No.  No.  And, no.  If you want to know how we did it, click here.

Anyway, on to the list.  So, in no particular ranking, but in the order in which they were published, these are the twenty-four apps we reviewed:

1.    Evernote
2.    SoundHound
3.    Better Christmas List
4.    Postagram/Sincerely Ink
5.    Lose It
6.    ePrint
7.    Pandora
8.    Words With Friends
9.    Alarm Clock
10.  Fantasy Monster Football
11.  Capture
12.  Glo Bible 
13.  Silent Film Director
14.  Grocery IQ
15.  SnapTell
16.  All Recipes/Epicurious
17.  Nike Training Club
18.  Pages
19.  App Advice
20.  Card Shark Deluxe
21.  TripIt
22.  Greeting/Holiday cards by Cardmon
23.  HootSuite
24.  BlogPress

Day Twenty. App Twenty. Card Shark.

Card Shark Deluxe is our favorite solitaire app.  As of this writing, there are sixty-two different solitaire games on the Card Shark Deluxe app.  Sixty. Two.  That's A LOT of card games!  We haven't even made it through half of them; largely because we're hooked on our favorites and haven't gotten bored with those yet.  We like how straightforward the app is to use and the fact that we don't need to be online to play these games, making it a great choice for travel.

It's customizable too.  The card backs and playing table can both be changed, using a variety of choices provided.  Also, we just discovered a cool feature that allows you to use any picture in your photo library as the card back or the playing table- how fun!  In addition, you can choose from a variety of decks (front of cards) or even customize those using your photo library (although it's a bit more involved a process than choosing the card backs or table).  

There are a number of other options for customization, but you can explore those yourself and see what you think.  We love it.

Day Eight. App Eight. Words With Friends.

Okay, you're one week into December and you've read about seven apps we love, you've learned how to savor the time with family (right? if not, click that link!), you're super organized with all your gift giving, and you're ready to kick back and play a game.  So, here's the game for you-  WordsWithFriends (Free, or you can pay a smidge and get rid of ads).  Basically the game is scrabble, but not sleep-inducing, wait-15-minutes-for-the-other-person-to-play scrabble. The beauty of Words with Friends is that you play (in theory, with your friends, but could also be with random people the computer hooks you up with) whenever you feel like it.  If you both are playing at the same time, the game can be pretty quick; if you are playing with us, it may take a day or two (maybe seven?) until we get around to playing again, so it can be much slower.  The nice thing is that you can have many games going, so whenever you want to play, there's usually a game ready for you.

No pressure, no waiting, no cost (if you don't mind the ads).  Your turn.

 [Update]: Words with Friends has an update today making it so you can see how many of any given tile there are remaining (nice if you are considering whether your wordplay could set up your friend for a massive triple pointer if they have a certain letter). It also now has a rating feature where the game basically let's you know how good or lousy your word is in comparison to the possibilities. We'll be curious to see whether or not people like these new additions to the game. Let us know what you think.