Apps

Try Evernote Scannable, which lets you digitize receipts and business cards

It seems like hundreds of new iPhone apps pop up every week, but which ones should you bother trying? We explored the App Store and found five apps actually worth downloading.

Evernote Scannable

Over the last few years, Evernote has become one of the most popular note-taking apps available. It combines the need for quick, on-the-go note-taking with cloud storage, never sacrificing the option for more in-depth composition.

Now, Evernote has introduced Scannable, which allows you to scan documents, receipts, or all other manners of paper, save them, and then share them with your contacts. That needlessly tall tower of papers and receipts on your desk waiting to be sorted for April 1st? Yeah, no more of that.

Evernote Scannable is free in the App Store.

CommitTo3

Many productivity apps expect far more than we can reasonably deliver. Yes, for some it is indeed great to have all of a day’s tasks outlined and color-coded in a single app, but for others, this level of scheduling seems overzealous and daunting.

CommitTo3 is an app that allows you to set three reasonable goals for the day, then tracks your completion/success rate. It’s an easy way to gain momentum. Think of it as the Couch-to-5k of productivity apps.

CommitTo3 is free in the App Store.

Water Tracker

When I get a little ornery, I have a friend who will condescendingly ask me: “Are you dehydrated?” The answer is, almost always, yes. We keep hearing about eight glasses a day, or ounces-to-body-weight ratios, but we’re all almost always in a constant state of dehydration.

Water Tracker is the app we all need on our phones. It tells users how much water they should consume in a day and then holds them to that number. It also has input settings for other beverages, so you can finally see that your coffee-to-water intake ratio is medically irresponsible. 4 p.m. headaches, frustration and physical discomfort can all be curbed if we obey Water Tracker.

Water Tracker is available for $1.99 in the App Store.

Player

For musicians and amateurs, Player is an incredibly useful tool. For the rest of us, it’s one of the most fascinating digital experiments around. The app takes songs from your library and then analyzes them, breaking them down by chords for piano or guitar while also revealing other relevant information. It’s a way of learning to play songs, or simply developing a far more intimate relationship with your music collection.

Player is free in the App Store.

iGreet

iGreet is an amazing app perhaps more for what it represents than the purpose it actually serves. It allows users to create customizable greeting cards that can then be printed out at a nearby Walgreens. The card is then scanned by the recipient, revealing secondary “augmented reality” content.

True, it’s a way of jazzing up boring greeting cards and making birthday cards that much more affectionate, but it also evidence that our phones are the key to getting a lot more out of even the most mundane aspects of non-digital life.

iGreet is free in the App Store.

Try Powder, a super-relaxing endless ski game

Looking for some fun new games to play on your iPhone? Here are five favorites TIME rounded up this week. Enjoy!

The Princess Bride

Although arguably less remarkable than the film that inspired it, The Princess Bride iOS game can only be described as “long expected.” A charming series of well-animated backgrounds combined with stills from the film set the scene for four small mini games. Among others, players can climb a cliff with a castigating Wally Shawn, or duel Inigo Montoya. Although nothing can surpass the magic of The Princess Bride, the game is a pleasant way to relive some of it.

The Princess Bride is available for $3.99 in the App Store.

Space Marshals

An amazingly animated iOS game, Space Marshals is the outer space equivalent of Cowboys and Aliens. Don a space-age 10-gallon hat and hunt down criminals. The game involves a surprising amount of strategy, with options to flank criminals, or lurk in the shadows until the moment is right to strike. Weapons and kits are just as sophisticated—choose the right body armor and blast enemies away with specialized grenades or assault rifles, shotguns, or pistols.

Space Marshals is available for $4.99 in the App Store.

1-bit Ninja Remix Rush

The most amazing aspect of 1-bit Ninja is its ability to fuse the most two-dimensional, basic, flattest gaming technology with the elegance of 3D iOS gaming. Hop around in a streamlined, retro landscape in order to fight the clock and destroy as many enemies as possible as an agile ninja character.

1-bit Ninja Remix Rush is available for $1.99 in the App Store.

Zoidtrip

Squirm around as a squid-like triangle with tentacles and navigate a basic but increasingly complicated landscape in order to avoid obstacles and platforms. Survive as long as you can and crush your high score. The higher you go, the more you can unlock, which means accessing new triangles of different colors and an array of adorable faces to match. Zoidtrip is a good way to pass a moment or two of spare time.

Zoidtrip is free in the App Store.

Powder

One of the most calming iOS games ever developed, Powder is a ski simulator that allows users to slowly go down an endless slope, slaloming around trees and obstacles—but never too challenging in pace or landscape. A great game to download if you’re prone to stress or angry outbursts in the middle of your work day. A digital stress ball.

Powder is free in the App Store.

To special screenings of Kingsman: The Secret Service

Now there could be a new way to get an early look at hotly anticipated movies: hail an Uber. The taxi app is launching a new partnership with 20th Century Fox to carry Uber riders to special screenings of the upcoming spy movie Kingsman: The Secret Service on Thursday. In 50 cities, Uber users will be able to enter a special promo code between now and Thursday for a chance to win tickets to the early screenings. In 9 cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, some winners will also receive complimentary Uber rides to the movie theater and film merchandise. Three grand-prize winners will get a paid vacation to New York to attend a special event for the film on Feb. 9.

Kingsman: The Secret Service doesn’t premiere nationally for another month, so Uber users are getting a pretty advanced look at the latest Colin Firth vehicle.

Try Routina, a beautiful reminder app that'll notify you for recurring appointments

Looking to download a few great iPhone apps while saving some money this weekend? Check out these five, all on sale or free right now.

Van Gogh: Painted With Words

With plenty of apps released by the world’s largest museums, you might think there’s little room for apps focused on a single artist. But this Van Gogh app is a true work of complete adoration for the artist, which makes as much apparent in the final product. Not only is the app amazingly interactive, with complete timelines of the artist’s works and biographical information, but it includes some of the less-well-known elements of his life, including letters with his brother Theo. The world would be a slightly smarter place if all apps about art were designed so well.

Van Gogh: Painted With Words is temporarily free in the App Store.

Beer Buddy

An app that allows you to scan barcodes on beer bottles in order to learn more about your beverage, Beer Buddy is perhaps much more useful than many would like to admit. It’s a constant struggle to remember the name of a beer you once had at that place after your buddy’s thing that time a year ago. It all seems so vague, but you remember the label was green and that it tasted good. Beer Buddy takes care of that problem, making it easy to get information about your drink and put together a favorites list based on your scans.

Beer Buddy is on sale for $0.99 in the App Store.

File Hub

A great app for storing or managing files, File Hub allows you to monitor all your cloud services, like Google Drive and Dropbox. The app provides a single uniform platform to access your files across those services, complete with a PDF reader, a music and video player, and a few ways of transferring files when necessary.

File Hub is temporarily free in the App Store.

Routina

Routina is a completely different kind of productivity/reminder app. It’s not a grocery list or a workflow organizer; rather, Routina reminds you of recurring events. Simply tell your app to remind you to pay rent every month, visit the doctor twice a year, or visit your grandmother once every 2 weeks, and the app will send you an alert at the right moment. It also happens to be really pleasant to look at.

Routina is on sale for $0.99 in the App Store.

NewsBar

NewsBar is a very customizable RSS reader that allows you to curate news based on source, keyword, or interest, publishing updates to your phone the moment a story goes live. No swipe and load—the app sends you a notification that stories have been loaded to your device. Definitely one of the better mobile-optimized RSS readers.

NewsBar is on Sale for $2.99 in the App Store.

Sleep is fast becoming a high-tech affair

Sleep used to be so simple. You put your head on a pillow, closed your eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.

Today, it’s fast becoming a high-tech affair. And at this year’s International CES, there are plenty of companies that want to get into bed with you. Some want to monitor your rest patterns. Others want to help you battle sleep deprivation. And some just want to ensure the room stays comfortable as you doze.

Sleep technology’s modern roots reach back to the 1980s, when Bob and JoAnn Walker founded Select Comfort, with its “sleep number” adjustable mattresses. In Q3 2014, the company reported sales of $323 million, raising its full-year outlook to $1.12 per share.

Recently, dozens, if not hundreds, of devices have hit the market – and experts say that number’s only going to increase.

“As sensors become smaller, cheaper and more prevalent, it has now become feasible to measure sleep in ways that have never been possible before outside of a laboratory,” says David Cloud, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation. “We believe that the bedroom is the next frontier in home technology and the number of products designed for the bedroom will continue to grow – rapidly.”

At this year’s CES, it’s hard to miss the focus on sleep. Most new iterations of wearable fitness bans include some sort of sleep monitoring – if they didn’t already. But the innovations don’t stop there.

Read more at Fortune.com.

Go beyond Facebook and Instagram this year

You’ve just come back from holiday vacation, and you’re looking for an easy way to share your incredible trip with all your friends. Sure, there’s Facebook and Instagram — but these six iPhone apps, recently highlighted by Apple, are purpose-built for the task and create beautiful-looking photo and video stories to boot.

Replay

Essentially, if you want to be able to make a multimedia Facebook album to share with your friends, Replay allows you to assemble photos, videos, music, and a variety of different fonts, and edit it into a single, sharable file. It’s about as nostalgic as you can get while using an iPhone.

Replay is free in the App Store.

Steller

A storytelling app that puts a lot of emphasis on the elegance of a final product. Steller allows users to piece together photo essays and make use of various cropping tools as well as a large number of headers and classic fonts. It makes it easy and even fun for someone else to sit through your vacation photos. Steller can make looking through an album feel a lot more like thumbing through a great coffee table book.

Steller is free in the App Store.

Storehouse

If you’re someone who likes to use a variety of photo sharing and editing clients, but prefers ease of use and simplicity, then Storehouse is a great app to download. It takes a page out of Snapchat’s story-telling function by allowing you to put together a timeline or a collage of photos with linearity in mind. Storehouse also allows you to explore content put together by other users.

Storehouse is free in the App Store.

Heyday Photo Journal

Users play a far less hands-on role with Heydey Photo Journal, and interact with it simply by using their phone as they normally would. Heyday takes the locations you visit and pairs them with the photos taken that day in order to reproduce an editable album. Instead of making you think more about how to keep track of memories, Heyday does most of the work for you.

Heyday Photo Journal is free in the App Store.

1 Second Everyday

If you’re more into the Boyhood-Richard-Linklater style of storytelling, 1 Second Everyday is probably the app you’ll want to use. Instead of having users make involved photo albums or tell stories with video clips and text banners, this app allows users to film one second of their day, which can be revisited by day or edited into a single reel. It’s a sweet way to look back on a year, if not a slightly melancholic one.

1 Second Everyday is $0.99 in the App Store.

Lightt

Lightt is everything you wish Instagram were and everything Vine and Snapchat will never be. It allows users to edit photos and video clips using a huge number of filters and settings and then share the finished product on social media (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter) or even email it. There’s something heartwarming about how simple it is to share clips of your life on Lightt.

Lightt is available for free in the App Store.

It's not something most people would know right off the bat

“They laughed in my face when I asked what they thought about Facebook,” writes Business Insider’s Maya Kosoff in her report Friday on what she learned during the holidays from her younger cousins. “It’s for moms,” they explained.

Then a 13-year-old cousin asked Kosoff if she knew about AirDrop.

There followed an unsolicited endorsement for a little-known iPhone feature from a key Apple cohort: Schoolchildren with smartphones.

Among the kids in her cousins’ New Jersey middle school, Kosoff reports, the most-used app for exchanging images during school hours isn’t Snapchat or Instagram, but AirDrop.

Read more at Fortune.com.