Apps of Interest

Scouring the app store for (mostly) free apps that served to both immediately attract me and at the same time be deep enough to hold my interes proved to be incredibly difficult. I asked my brother in law who is currently in med school for recommendations on good interactive medical apps, and while I'm sure they were, none of them were sold for under $14.00. So I set out on my own search for relatively inexpensive medical apps, and I came across the 3D Brain App by Cold Spring Harbor. It wasn't particularly extraordionary in it's execution, but it has most of what I would want in a mostly interactive and informative app about the brain. It covers the 29 main structures of the brain, and also provides you with a rotatable diagram, informing you of its location and relevance to the systems in the brain. The information provided about each system is really where most of its depth lies though. It provides information about overall functions of the system, case studies about the system, associated functions, cognitive disorders, and much more for each individual system. It's biggest weakness, however, is honestly it's presentation. Everything is fairly easy to find, however nothing really stands out. Also, the "3D" model of the brain is only a faux model; it can only rotate on its x and y axis, and zooming in reveals it is only a prerecorded animation. I think its depth of content and fairly easy to understand interface are its strengths though, and I think the Ringling app could benefit from that.

 The second app is a lot simpler in purpose and idea. LED Studio HD is a very basic frame by frame animation program using the concept of LED dots more or less as pixels. It also was free, and has a surprising amount of depth and Intuitiveness for a free app. It has onion skinning, different playback speeds, copy and paste functionality, and the gesture sensitivity is excellent. It's incredibly entertaining due to its immediate pick up and play functionality, and it definitely held my interest for quite a while. While the basic concept is a little too simple for what we're tryin to do, I believe it's ease of use and easy to understand interface are definitely to be considered.

The final app I examined is called Pixelwave. This app caught my eye due to its incredibly pleasing visual interface. In its purest for, it is simply a waveform editor, similar to an oscilloscope. It's interface it almost invisible, though its very easy to figure out. If you drag your figure horizontally across the top half of the screen, you can draw the waveform you're hearing, and berating your finger vertically will change the level and frequency I FTP waveform. The app was 0.99, but upon reading the positive reviews I felt confident enoug to try it out. It was definitely worth the purchase, as it also has deeper editing functions such as MIDI controls, octaves, echo, and recording. It's biggest strength however is its sheen of presentation. The pixels fade off from every object and create a beautifully simple interface for a fairly complicated subject. That I thi is something to take into consideration for the Rngling app.