Fresh iPhone Apps for Nov. 18: ScanLife update, Black Friday App, Alcove

Black Friday, the year’s biggest shopping day, is just 11 days away, and we’ve got a couple of free Fresh Apps to help gear you up for holiday shopping. Scan barcodes in stores to find the best price in your area, or check leaked Black Friday ads ahead of their release: you’ll find both below, plus more.

ScanLife update (iPhone) Free

With ScanLife, your iPhone’s camera turns into a barcode reader that can handle several different kinds of codes, including standard product barcodes and QR codes. ScanBuy, the developer behind the app, is releasing a new update for the holidays that beefs up the app’s features when scanning product barcodes.

Already, when you scan a code in a store, you get information on the product from Amazon.com and the ability to buy it straight out of the app. The new features provide price comparisons on the product from stores in your area via Milo.com, checks Coupons.com for applicable coupons to help you get the best price, and skims through Food Essentials’ database to bring up nutrition facts when you scan food products.

Black Friday App (iPhone) Free

As long as you’re scanning products for current deals for your holiday shopping, you should grab this app for a potential look into the near future to make sure you save the most money possible during the busiest shopping day of the year.

Black Friday App is free and provides a big database of Black Friday ads from various stores. The ads are often the official offerings from various retailers, but the app’s database also features some “leaked” ads that got released early, so you can get a jump on the competition come November 26.

Alcove (iPad) $2.99

The best part about the Google search engine is its image search function, which displays all the resulting images in a big grid that’s easy to browse through. Alcove is a search app for iPad that operates on a similar design — when you run a search, it simultaneously scours videos, photos and tweets for relevant entries and arranges them in a “book shelf” style display.

Each of the search results lands on one of three shelves, separated by type, so looking through your results becomes like browsing a book shelf in your house. This clean and easy-to-use display makes Alcove a definite contender for entertainment browsing.

Latest from NewsReports