This month, practice writing with Dynamilis, an amazingly in-depth handwriting app. Keep organized with Subjects, a digital planner for students. Proofread documents, or simply listen to books with Voice Dream Reader, a popular text-to-speech app. Finally, relax with some puzzles in Swim Out – who knew getting out of a pool was such a challenge?
Tip: Many good apps these days have subscriptions with free trials. This is great as it lets you preview the app and decide if it is right for you. Remember, you can cancel a free trial right away and still get the full free trial period to test out an app. That way you don’t get charged if you accidentally forget about it, and you can always re-subscribe seamlessly if you wish to pay to continue to use the app.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Dynamilis – Kids’ Handwriting
By Shool Rebound SA
Dynamilis is a smart, full featured app for improving handwriting. Yes, it allows kids to trace letters, but it goes far beyond that with exercises that teach kids to apply the right amount of pressure when writing, to lift the pencil at the appropriate time, to control their strokes, and to develop fine motor skills. Dynamilis does this through interesting games, such as using pressure to guide a submarine or to uncover fossils, using colors to show kids when to hold the pencil down and when to lift it when writing, using precision to fly a helicopter, and much more. As you might guess, the app works best with a stylus, in particular an Apple Pencil that can measure pressure and angle. Dynamilis analyzes each child’s writing, recommends exercises, and tracks progress. It is the most impressive and comprehensive printing and handwriting app I’ve seen. Dynamilis requires that you create an account and offers a seven day free trial, with a subscription to continue using the app.
Subjects — student planner
Subjects helps students track their timetables, assignments and grades. It offers a convenient calendar view so students can see their schedule for a week, month, or day. The homework tab shows all past and future assignments with due dates and check marks for completion, plus optional grade tracking. The app can notify you about approaching classes and assignments, and it offers widgets for your home screen that will let you see what’s coming up at a glance. Of course, students have to enter all of this information, but for those willing to do so, the app offers a clean and helpful way to track their course work. Subjects is free to use, with an optional subscription to unlock on screen widgets, notifications, and syncing across multiple devices.
Voice Dream Reader
Voice Dream Reader reads documents out loud using a number of synthesized computer voices. It can of course read text files, but also PDFs and electronic books (ePUBs), Word documents, Google documents, PowerPoint, and audio files. It even has an option to run optical character recognition on scanned documents. It can also import web pages from Safari using the share button and store them to read now or later. You can organize your library of documents into folders if you wish, and there are also options to sort things by type or where they came from. The reader displays the document and will highlight words as it speaks for certain documents like ePUBS or web archives. You can double tap to start the narration at a given place, or skip ahead and skip backward, speed up the narration, and highlight important passages. The reader helpfully continues when you leave the app, so you can keep listening in the background. Voice Dream Reader comes with a seven day free trial, and a yearly subscription to keep using all of the features (that’s a yearly subscription, so be sure to cancel during the free trail period if you don’t want to continue using the app).
Swim Out
By Lozange Lab
Swim out is a stylish puzzle game where you attempt to swim to the pool exit, while avoiding all of the other swimmers and various hazards along the way. It reminds me a bit of the Rush Hour parking puzzle games, except in this case you are moving the entire time, as are all of the other swimmers. Soving each puzzle involves recognizing patterns and thinking ahead. The difficulty ramps up quickly, but each puzzle is relatively short, so failing doesn’t cost too much time and gives you insight into the next attempt. For fans of puzzle games, this is a fun one, with lots of variety and plenty of satisfying challenge.
