20 best iPhone and iPad apps this week

Jackie Junko is a colourful, well-crafted iPad storybook app for kids

 

It's time for our weekly roundup of new and notable iOS apps – those released for the first time this week, or which have been newly ported from iPhone to iPad (or vice versa).
The roundup includes apps and games, and the pricing in brackets relates to the initial download – some apps listed as free may include in-app purchases. The Android roundup was published earlier in the day.
Here's this week's pick of the App Store:

Sunrise Calendar (Free)

The march of apps aiming to replace Apple's preloaded tools on your iPhone continues. Sunrise is a very slick calendar app designed to work with Google Calendar, Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter two are optional though) to keep you organised. It's very intuitive to use. The fear, as with any app like this, is that a bigger technology company will quickly buy and mothball it.
iPhone

Jackie Junko (£2.99)

This lovely app from developer Springy Thingy popped up in my App Store RSS feeds and immediately stood out for its craft. It's a storybook app for children based on boats and animals, with 15 pages of interactivity and animation for kids to play with.
iPad

Traktor DJ (£13.99)

Profiled at more length earlier in the week, Traktor DJ is the work of Native Instruments: an iPad DJing app based on its popular Traktor software and hardware. Forget virtual decks: this is all based around multi-touch manipulation of waveforms to mix, scratch and loop, with clever Dropbox syncing for professional DJs to use it as a preparation tool.
iPad

Red Nose Day In Your Pocket (Free)

Comic Relief is gearing up for its UK comedy telethon on 15 March, with this official app offering news, videos and mini-games to get viewers engaged before the event. Stephen Fry, Keith Lemon and Mary Berry all make appearances.
iPhone

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Explore Shakespeare (£9.99)

This is part of Cambridge University Press' series of digital Shakespeare plays, offering the full text of A Midsummer Night's Dream along with an audio performance, photos of professional productions, glossary definitions, notes, word-clouds for each scene, theme-lines to navigate the key themes, and suggested activities. It sits alongside another new release for Twelfth Night.
iPad

Motor World: Car Factory (Free)

Freemium game Motor World: Car Factory takes its visual cues from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, as you marshal a factory of pixelly people to build cars, upgrading your facilities as you go. There's a CSR Racing-style mini-game where you race, and a genuine addiction factor – I write this as someone who was playing it at 2am earlier this week.
iPhone

O2 Matchday (Free)

An intriguing app from O2 UK for rugby fans, designed to be used while watching England's home games in the Six Nations tournament. The app streams live audio from the match referee's mic, so you can listen to every shout. Live stats, scores and squads are also included, as well as match previews beforehand. Warning: it won't work if you're actually at Twickenham for the games.
iPhone

Albumatic (Free)

Will the next big thing in mobile photo-sharing be collaborative albums with friends? Several startups are hoping so, with Albumatic the latest example. The idea: you and friends nearby take photos to be stored together in online albums, with other friends able to watch them in real-time as the pics flow in.
iPhone

Haze (£0.69)

Yet another app hoping to consign an Apple app to your Junk folder. Haze is a weather app that strips out clutter to focus on temperature, rain chances, forecasts and windchills, all with a simple swipe-based interface. Oh, and pretty colours, which always helps. Well, it helps when the forecast is grey and wet, anyway.
iPhone

Audiobooks from Audible (Free)

Amazon's audiobooks service Audible has been available on iPhone for a while, but it's now been ported to iPad – which arguably is just as useful a device for listening to literature. As on iPhone, the app offers a catalogue of more than 80k audiobooks to download to the device.
iPad

Wanderer:War Song (£1.49)

More fun for fans of the "well-tooled hero fights monsters several times bigger than him" school of combat games (see also: Infinity Blade). Developed using the Unreal Engine 3, the scenery and beasties look marvellous, while its promise that you can move freely during combat may appeal to gamers looking for a new, less-on-rails challenge.
iPhone / iPad

Emma in Africa – Book Puzzle (Free)

Another children's app this, and just as well-crafted. Emma in Africa combines storytelling – about a pre-school-aged explorer travelling in Africa – with digital shape puzzles. If your children have been entranced by David Attenborough's Africa TV series, Emma may be the perfect interactive follow-up.
iPad

Walkonomics (Free)

This is a really good idea: an app that gets people to rate the "pedestrian-friendliness" of streets, or just browse the database of other users' ratings. Streets are scored out of five in a range of categories: road safety, hilliness, fear of crime and so on. It works for England, New York and San Francisco.
iPhone

Sterling (£1.49)

I like the idea of Sterling, a "simple budget planner" app that gets you to input rough calculations about spending and saving, complete with a "What If?" feature that lets you mess around with figures when trying to plan ahead, without actually changing the real numbers.
iPhone

Village Voice (Free)

US publication Village Voice has released a new app that's less a magazine, and more a city-guide. It includes its events and concert calendar, as well as blogs on local New York politics, music, food and arts. Photo slideshows and daily deals are also included: it looks an invaluable app for anyone travelling to the Big Apple.
iPhone

Hell Yeah! Pocket Inferno (£0.69)

This game is published by Sega, and developed by the team behind console indie game Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit. It sees you playing Ash – "a devil rabbit and the prince of Hell" – leaping through a side-scrolling game seeing off monsters. 50 levels are included, as are in-app purchases.
iPhone / iPad

A Troop is a Group of Monkeys (£1.49)

Yes, it is. Different to a pandemonium of parrots or an ostentation of peacocks, as you'll know. Or will you? This marvellous children's app aims to teach kids the plural nouns for various animals, aided by music and rhyme. Oh, and by the animals themselves, who have bags of character. Notes for teachers and parents are also included.
iPad

Mokriya Craigslist (Free)

This app isn't from listings website Craigslist itself, but it IS "officially licensed" by the company. What's more, it's very slickly designed – more so than the site by a long chalk. The app helps you browse listings, including by location, while setting alerts and push notifications for specific kinds. You can also post your own listings from within the app.
iPhone

ShowScoop Concerts (Free)

Yes, that band you're going to see live sound good on record, but what if their gigs are shambolic? ShowScoop is a website (and now an app) trying to provide this information. It encourages gig-goers to rate bands on metrics like stage performance, crowd interaction and sound quality. It's almost a Metacritic for live music.
iPhone

The Gods: Rebellion (£0.69)

Finally this week, one more entry in the Mythical theme / giant monsters / big-sworded hero genre, from Chillingo. It's an action game taking its cues from God of War, Infinity Blade and others, with Unreal-powered graphics and in-app purchases to boost your chances if necessary.
iPhone / iPad
That's this week's selection, but what apps are you enjoying on iOS this week? Make your recommendations or comment on the apps listed above in the Comments section.