Facades, crAion, Readbay.ai, and other apps to check out this weekend

Let’s do this one more time before 2024, shall we? It’s the weekend everybody, and you know what that means! It’s time for another Apps of the Week roundup! This week we have some fantastic picks for you including a field guide for Apple stores, an Ai app that interprets your child’s art, and an app that wants to help you keep your reading resolutions. And as always, we’ve selected a fun new game for you to check out.

Facades

Here’s an app that’s perfect for a bunch of Apple nerds like us. It’s called Facades, and it’s billed as an ‘Apple Store Field Guide.’ In it you can find a catalog of more than 500 Apple Store locations that you can browse and search through, save via bookmarks and favorites, and even add to a wish list of stores you’d like to visit. You can search by name, location, year or rollout number, and you can even browse store design styles and features. I think we all kind of take Apple Stores for granted these days, because they have been around for so long and so many of us have them just up the street now. But at one time, these stores were few and far between, and so folks would travel long distances to marvel at the glass-panelled masterpieces.

Download for free

crAion: Kids Drawings Analysis

This is one of the more interesting uses of Ai I’ve seen as of late, but I can’t tell if it’s cool or creepy. CrAion (clever? yes. Annoying to write? yes) is an app aimed at helping you discover a new perspective on your child’s imagination. Essentially you scan in your kid’s artwork with your phone’s camera, and CrAion will offer up its own interpretation of it, complete with hidden meanings and emotions it believes your child is expressing. So this is all well and good if the interpretation is like “your child feels loved and very safe,” but you can just imagine how weird and dark this could get in a hurry. Anyway the app is ad-free, has a built-in gallery, and all your artwork is secure and protected. Go ahead. Try it out. I dare you.

Download for free

Readbay.ai – Just 1 Daily Read

Ok, let’s be honest here. Next week starts the New Year, and everyone is going to make their annual New Year’s resolutions. How many of you are going to pick “read more” as one of your resolutions? Ok, hands down. Now how many of you think you are actually going to “read more” in 2024? That’s what I thought. Readbay.ai understands how terrible reading is, and aims to make it easier using—yep, you guessed it—Ai. The app focuses on quality over quantity, and consistency over intensity, with an AI-enhanced coach that will help you read just 1 (starting off) article per day from Great Minds. You’ll take steps to better internalize the top tidbits from the article, and use the built-in streak builder to stay motivated to keep reading. The result? Personal growth town, population: you, bro.

Download for free

Dynasty Warriors M

To tell you the truth, I really wanted to find a chill game for this weekend. I thought: it’s New Year’s Eve, there’s football, parties, hangovers, etc.—let’s do a game this week that is calming and relaxing. But what did I end up going with? DYNASTY WARRIORS M, OH YEAHHHHHHHH!!! The game of course lets you experience the legendary Dynasty Warriors story in an entirely new format. I’m terrible at discerning between the different genres, but I think there is some real-time strategy here, maybe some turn-based elements, whatever, doesn’t matter. The game itself is incredibly in-depth, with 520 stages to play through, and 50 Officers to collect from 13 regions and 5 factions. In it you’ll explore the vast world of the historic Three Kingdoms Era, capturing castles and gathering loot along your way to grow your empire. This game is not something I normally play, but hey, if it’s anything like Ages of Empire, I am so in.

Download for free

App-related news and tutorials from this week

• Japan will force Apple and Google to allow outside app stores and payments
• How to have your iPhone remember where you parked your car
• How to use detection mode in the Magnifier app on iPhone
• How to fix Apple TV audio not working on TV, HomePod, AirPods, and other speakers