New and Noteworthy Apps of 2016

With extraordinary technological advances and a skyrocketing demand for apps of all shapes and sizes, the search through your app store is pretty futile unless you know exactly what to look for. 2016 has been a great year for the app developer and consumer, with apps spreading and updating like wildfire in categories like photography and editing, productivity, health and fitness, games, music, education, and more. Ensure you’re getting all you can out of your smartphone by jacking it up with apps that can turn the least tech-savvy person into a productivity machine! Here you’ll find apps for the smartphone user from any neck of the woods. Happy shopping!

Snapseed

Think you need to upload your photos to a desktop for superior editing tools? Think again. Snapseed is changing the photo editing experience and boasts some of the most high-tech and precise editing tools available on a smartphone, including a "healing" tool which removes dirt and dust from an image, a selective adjust tool, and high-quality filters. Perhaps most notably, every edit is stackable, meaning you can remove or edit any filter within the stack. Photo editing software like Snapseed, which is free to download, is really changing the game for uber-expensive desktop photo editing software like Photoshop.

Foodie

Are you the type of person who takes so many photos of your burger that it’s cold when you finally bite into it? Everyone has probably ordered the most photogenic item on the menu in hopes of racking up their Instagram likes––it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Now, rather than sticking to Instagram’s filters, Foodie has been developed as a photo editor strictly for food photography. It boasts 26 food-specific filters like "romantic," "crispy," "chewy," and "yum," as well as a guide to taking food photos from directly above. With Foodie being free, it’s become a craze among––you guessed it––foodies everywhere. 

CheatSheet

Your life is filled with numbers, combinations, passwords, and reminders that you may not want to keep in your notes app for either security or convenience reasons. Next time you forget your hotel room number or your girlfriend’s birthday, pull up your (free) Cheatsheet from the notifications center and refer to the app’s various icons to remind you of what you’re looking for. Cheatsheet is truly the external hard drive for every data-swamped brain and a must-download for 2016. 

FitStar Personal Trainer

Among all exercise and fitness apps, the FitStar Personal Trainer seems to be the hottest, newest, and most highly acclaimed on the market. FitStar is so special because with a $29.99 yearlong premium membership, you get the customized and feedback-oriented workout assistance that a personal trainer would provide for hundreds more. FitStar Personal Trainer offers HD videos of your custom workouts, music to power you through them, and integration with the Health app on your iPhone to track your progress and keep you motivated. 

CD Scanner for Spotify

Spotify itself is arguably one of the best apps available with its huge database of music, low prices, and shareable playlists. However, the switch to downloadable tunes presents a problem for the decades-long music buff: what to do with all of those CDs? CD Scanner for Spotify allows you to simply scan the barcode on the back of any of your CD cases and immediately import the whole album to your Spotify playlist. CD Scanner for Spotify is especially convenient because of the amount of time it generally takes to hand-select songs from an album on Spotify. 

Hotel Tonight

Whether your layover is longer than you expected or you decide to spontaneously spend the night in a new city, you’re sometimes forced to face exorbitant last-minute hotel booking fees. Luckily, the developers of Hotel Tonight have been given the scoop (and great discounts) from fabulous hotels so that you can book last-minute affordably. Hotel Tonight’s database is incredibly fast and easy; its hotel descriptions are succinct, and it is available for more than just last minute planning. 

LetterBoxd

How many hours have you wasted on movies that you hand-selected from Netflix but turned out to be less than cinematic masterpieces? Let’s be honest: there may be more mediocre films out there than good ones. LetterBoxd connects you to the Average Joe movie consumer and the cinema buff alike and grants you access to tons of reviews, recommendations, ratings, and lists ranging from the up-and-coming to the classic. Give back to your community by rating films yourself on LetterBoxd’s approachable, coherent platform.

DuoLingo

The Wall Street journal dubbed DuoLingo as "the best language-learning app" and there’s little mystery why: first, DuoLingo grants you access to fluency of 15 languages… absolutely free. Duolingo offers brief challenges and games on a colorful, easy-to-use interface. According to Duolingo’s developers, 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a semester of university-level education! As far as education apps go, DuoLingo is truly groundbreaking, especially for the notoriously monolingual American consumer. A crucial skill that often costs thousands to obtain is now available to the public for free. 

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