Fresh iPhone Apps for Aug. 16: Moby by Contigo, Amazon Student, Carry Me Home, Zombie Minesweeper

Keep track of loved ones for their safety and yours with the help of Moby by Contigo, today’s leading Fresh iPhone App. It’s designed to help you let people keep track of you during situations that are potentially dangerous, like blind dates. In celebration of returning to school, we follow that up with Amazon Student, which makes buying textbooks (and selling them) extremely easy. Speaking of buying textbooks, Carry Me Home is an instant board game (or drinking game) for any party that’s kind of dull. Meanwhile, Zombie Minesweeper is a brilliant reimagining of the classic Minesweeper, but with some more modern action elements.

Moby by Contigo (iPhone, iPad) Free

There are quite a few apps that make use of iOS devices’ GPS capabilities to let users keep track of their friends’ and family’s whereabouts, but many have an aim toward social interaction, like meeting up at a party or figuring out what place is popular on a given night. Moby, on the other hand, is a location app that’s geared towards safety, allowing users to keep track of the whereabouts of loved ones and only sharing location information with key close individuals, rather than lots of friends or acquaintances.

Since Moby is about tracking friends and loved ones for safety, it’s not usually set to always broadcasting your location or tied to check-ins at venues, like other location-based services apps are. Instead, you can set the duration for others to be able to keep track of you, say during a blind date. You can also use it to notify others of your location should you need help or assistance.

Amazon Student (iPhone, iPad) Free

With school season starting up already for some students old and young alike, textbooks quickly become a necessity. For college students, they can get costly in a hurry, so there’s Amazon Student which allows them to scan the barcodes on books and instantly look them up on Amazon.com. The app is great for comparison shopping in your local campus bookstore, providing a price-check and the ability to make a purchase instantly.

Amazon Student isn’t just about buying books, however. It also allows students to quickly find out how much they can sell their textbooks (and other items) back to Amazon for, and complete the transaction from within the app. You also get free two-day shipping on your books whenever you purchase them using Amazon Student.

Carry Me Home – The Ultimate Party Game (iPhone, iPad) $0.99

As long as we’re talking about heading back to college, we might as well mention a fun app that turns your iPhone or iPad into a drinking game. Start up Carry Me Home and you can choose from one of three game lengths, and then start playing a bunch of small rounds of games based on the prompts given on “cards” on the screen. The object is to out-play your friends and wind up winning the “trophy” object you designate at the beginning of the game.

You don’t have to play Carry Me Home with drinking (it’s still pretty fun sans alcohol), since the object is to best your opponents. Cards include prompts like word associations, in which someone will say a word and the other players will take turn saying something related to it as quickly as possible; or challenges to name as many comedians or video games (or whatever) as you can think of, with the first person to stumble losing. Carry Me Home is a fun and minimalist party game that’s great when you’ve got a few bored friends over.

Zombie Minesweeper (iPhone, iPad) $0.99

Chances are good anyone who has owned a computer during the last 20 years has played Minesweeper, the addictive logic game in which players clear tiles from a grid on a game board and are given clues as to where mines are hidden with the use of numbers. Zombie Minesweeper is the same concept, but, as you might have guessed, with zombies – which is a very good thing.

Instead of clicking away at a colorless grid, Zombie Minesweeper’s game boards are paths you need to cross with the game’s main character. As you tap tiles to move onto them, you’ll reveal more of the board and more information about where you can go and where you can’t. Slapping flags on suspect tiles to mark the presence of mines earns you points and achievements, but don’t forget the zombies chasing you! You can kill them with bombs you pick up through the course of each level, or you can lure them into mines to take them out that way. The more zombies dispatched without getting eaten, the higher your score.

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