5 iPhone Apps You Just Can’t Miss This Week

It seems like hundreds of new iPhone apps pop up every week, but which ones should you bother trying? We explored the App Store and found five apps actually worth downloading.

Timeline

News is like the mail: There’s no start date, and there’s definitely no end date. Timeline seems to have figured out that one of the best ways to deliver mobile news to readers is to curate stories and provide context. The app allows you to scroll through other stories attached to any given story in order to understand events in greater detail. In short, it treats the news like a timeline.

Timeline is free in the App Store

Funny or Die Weather

Some people just want their weather apps to give them, well, the weather. However, there’s a level of much-appreciated inanity to sites or apps that want to jazz up the weather for the sake of comedy alone. Funny or Die’s weather app gives you the weather, and then adds useless weather-related info (“the humidity of water is extremely high”) and captions just to make you laugh. It makes looking at bad, blizzardy weather a lot more bearable.

Funny or Die Weather is free in the App Store

Colors

Colors is sort of like the Andy Warhol’s Factory of apps. Apply 1,000 color filters over just about any combination of stencils to your photos. It’s completely unlike the standard photo filters — instead, it’s an experiment in turning your photos into surreal portraits. Toy around with this app with the same eager, naive eyes as the first moment you opened Instagram and learned about filters.

Colors is $0.99 in the App Store

Handle

Another minimal organization app for the scatterbrained, Handle takes all your tasks and appointments and merges them with your inbox. That means you’ll no longer have to coordinate between two apps and miss deadlines or meetings because of it. The app also organizes your whole life into a timeline that looks similar to many other iOS apps, which makes it a lot more intuitive to use than apps designed as downsized calendars.

Handle is free in the App Store.

Shifts

Shifts may be the fastest and easiest way to input simple data into your phone: You pick and place icons on a calendar that tell you whether you are working a night or morning shift or whether you have to go to school or you’ve got the day off. In short, it’s great for keeping track of your obligations with only a quick glance and minimal upkeep on your part.

Shifts is $1.99 in the App Store