Dating Boot Camp is something new we’re trying: an entire book contained in an application! We partnered with Alpha Books, a subsidiary of Penguin USA, to bring the book Dating Boot Camp by Lisa Altalida to the Hiptop/Sidekick family of devices. All 270+ pages of the book are contained inside the downloadable application.

Dating Boot Camp’s intended audience is a woman who’s looking for a man. Of course, men certainly might enjoy reading what approaches women might be using….

After the splash screen:

The folder view of chapters lets us quickly navigate anywhere in the book:

Individual sections can be selected within each chapter:

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The Cycle enables you to track your menstrual cycle, in order to better predict your upcoming cycle and upcoming fertile days. Alternatively, you could track this information for a friend/girlfriend/wife. This app might sound a little out of left field for a mobile device, but bear with us.

The app name & splash screen try to be discrete:

On entering the app, the first thing we do is enter the date of our last menstrual cycle start:

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Sudoku Daily takes the gameplay of Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 1 & Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 2, but downloads new sudoku puzzles every day.

It comes with 15 puzzles to start.Then every day, a new puzzle automatically appears:

As long as you don’t “Discard” the Sudoku Daily application, you’ll continue to receive new puzzles. Even if you’ve “Uninstalled” it from your device temporarily, you can re-install Sudoku Daily later on and still play the puzzles for the days you missed.

Sudoku Daily can only store 40 puzzles on-device at a time, though, so once you’ve completed a built-in or downloaded puzzle, you’ll probably want to remove it. Later on, you can restore any puzzle you’ve removed:

So if you’ve been subscribed for over a year, you’ll have access to 365+ puzzles.

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The Basic Rules

Kakuro is a great game–it’s sort of a cross between sudoku and crosswords. A kakuro puzzle looks like this:

The goal is to place the numbers 1 through 9 so that:

• every horizontal run of numbers adds up to the number on its left.
• every vertical run of numbers adds up to the number above.
• numbers are not duplicated within a run

If you’re new to Kakuro puzzles, some solving tips are included (Menu->Help->Solving Tips) inside Kakuro Puzzler.

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Basic Terms

Coach Potato’s Fitness Tracker is an application for tracking your exercise & workouts. There are some basic terms outlined in the instructions:

• Exercise: A particular activity or motion. Like “Sit Ups” or “Bench Press” or “Kyra’s Yoga Class”.
• Routine: A set of Exercises that you perform as a group. Like “Upper Body”.
• Workout: A Routine performed by you on a specific day. Like “Upper Body on January 20th at 3:00pm”.

Exercises

Coach Potato’s Fitness Tracker comes with 70+ exercises built in, but you can create your own fairly easily. Here’s the Exercise layout:
[Note: all screenshots have been cropped, to cleanly fit in a device web browser.]

Notice the folder names like “Aerobic” and “Weights”. These are user-customizable.

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Crossword Puzzler Vol. 2 is the sequel to Crossword Puzzler Vol. 1, with 30+ all-new custom-made crossword puzzles to solve.

New Features

A few new features were added with Crossword Puzzler Vol. 2. Notably, the grid color can now be set to something more interesting than gray. The intersecting-clue view and the all-clue view can also have their fonts set to Large.

Here’s a puzzle in progress with a purple grid, blue word color, and green highlighted-square color. The intersecting clues are set to the Large font, with the word length shown after the clue:

The squares containing multiple letters have “penciled in” letters. And, ah, we aren’t saying we endorse this color scheme, we’re just saying it’s possible….

Here’s an example of the Large font used in the all-clue view, with the already-completed letters shown, and the already-completed words grayed out:

For more screenshots, check out Crossword Puzzler Vol. 1!

Crossword Puzzler Vol. 1 contains 30+ custom-made crossword puzzles! The puzzles generally steer clear of obscure clues–you won’t find any clues involving “the third-longest river in Germany” or anything like that. Instead you’ll find more pop-culture references than usual, along with some extra twists like basic spanish words, computer terms…even “LOL”….

Basic puzzle layout

Here we see the basic layout, with a particular word selected. The clue for this word is “Karate master’s accessory”, shown in the title bar at the top of the screen:

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Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 2 is the sequel to Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 1 and incorporates a few changes. The most obvious change is the art next to the puzzles:

Vol. 2 has some feature upgrades:

• Puzzle names can be edited
• Puzzles can be sorted by progress
• Penciled numbers can be sorted within each square

Vol. 2 also enables choosing a number with a number picker:

This allows easier one-handed play using just the wheel, for those sudoku-filled train or bus rides.

Check out Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 1 for more screenshots & info!

Sections:

• Choosing a Puzzle
• Playing a Puzzle
• Creating a Custom Puzzle

Choosing a Puzzle

Sudoku Puzzler starts by presenting all 65 puzzles organized into folders by difficulty. Custom puzzles are stored separately, in their own folder. Click a puzzle to begin playing.

Playing a Puzzle

When navigating the sudoku puzzle, the currently selected square is always colored. The relevant row, column, and 3×3 box are also highlighted.

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Quotation Rotation is a word game that includes 150 scrambled quotations from a variety of sources.

Quotation Rotation starts up with several folders of puzzles. The folders indicate the general category of puzzles inside, such as “Movie Lines” or “Deep Thoughts”. The list includes the puzzle name, the puzzle size (S, M, L), and how much progress you’ve made on the puzzle so far.

Once inside the puzzle, the goal is to unscramble the quotation. Letters can only be rotated within a column, so all letters within a column will be used in the quotation

Note: Words can continue across lines! A word continues until a gray square stops it.

Movement: Wheel (up/down), menu-wheel (left/right), and directional pad (up/down/left/right) move the selected row and column of letters.

Select letters to swap with Return or wheel-click, or type the letter to swap with.

Tips:

• Capital letters often appear at the beginning of sentences.
• Periods often appear at the end of sentences.
• There are only a few three-letter words, fewer two-letter words, and very few one-letter words.
• Experiment! There’s no harm in guessing.
• When you’re really low on ideas, a Hint will solve an entire column of letters.

FAQ

• How is a puzzle’s size determined?

Answers:
Q: How is a puzzle’s size determined?
A: A puzzle is classified as Small, Medium, Large, or Extra Large (S, M, L, XL) based on the number of letter it contains. A small puzzle is less than one screen wide, a medium puzzle is about one screen wide, and a large puzzle is notably wide than one screen. Extra large is just, well, huge. Give or take. It’s mainly meant as an approximation, so that you have an idea of what you’re getting in to when you’re deciding which puzzle to play.