Bitmoji – The Avatar That Doesn't Make You Look Like A Kid

I've been playing around with emojis and avatars for quite some time and most are pretty lame. They make your look like children (probably because they're designed for kids and teens), but what if you're an adult and want an avatar that at least resembles a grown up? Meet my new favorite:

Bitmoji

My Bitmoji

THIS is your own, personal emoji which you can, obviously, customize to look like you. Choose your physical features (I love that they have different body types, including curvy), then dress yourself in designer clothes. 

Your Bitmoji will then be available in dozens of moods and stickers with updates coming in about once a week. And they're not just happy, “rainbows and lollipops” pictures. You can show a range of emotions including embarrassment, rage, impatience, etc. Now, the content rating is Teen because of “Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Language, Crude Humor”, but that's what makes it perfect for adults.  At the moment, the themes include Star Wars, Zoolander No. 2, Terminator, Inside Out (love Rage), and Game Of Thrones. 

Download your Bitmoji for use as a screensaver, with a photo editing tool, and/or share it to Facebook, Instagram, etc.  I've used on on all my social media and even texted my Bitmoji to my kids as a hint to show them how I'm feeling (the surprised one confuses them pretty well).

Confuses the crackers out of the kids!  "What do you mean, Mom?!!"

Best of all, this app is FREE and available from the Play Store or the App Store. 

Give Bitmoji a whirl! 

 This ain't your kids' avatar! 

Thanks for reading!!!

A Fun, Unique Take On An Old Word Game: Meet Wordox

One of the few non-caloric obsessions I have is with word games. Most, however, fall into one of three categories:

1) Scrabble-like where you build words with others' words 

2) Boggle-like where you try to build words out of random letters

3) Word Search-like where, you know, you search for words. 

Whenever I look on Goggle's Play Store for something different, I'm usually disappointed. Until now. Introducing my newest word game obsession:

Wordox

It's a Scrabble-like like game, but with a twist: you can steal the other person's letters! When you make a word out of one of the other person's letters, you get the points for that letter and it comes OFF their score. That means you can flip the game in your favor!  

Here's the video showing how to play:   

Play with friends, through Facebook, and with random players. Participate regularly in the rankings with other players, and finish at the top to earn coins and jokers! 

One of the challenges I really like is that if you make a mistake and a word isn't valid, it's going to cost you either a turn or a joker. That means I really have to be up on my game and certain before I hit PLAY.

The free version comes without ads, but I love Wordox so much, I bought the ad-free version. Give it a try and let me know what you think. This app is available again, through the Play Store or the App Store. For more information, visit http://www.wordox.com.

As always, THANKS FOR READING!

ULTRAFLOW - An Addicting FREE Game Great For Kids & Adults

Okay, old-time gamers: remember PONG, one of the earliest arcade video games? It was a two-dimensional graphics tennis game that was one of the first to reach mainstream popularity.  It was brilliant in its simplicity, yet it was still a challenge. I remember poo-pooing at how easy the game seemed, only to be frustrated when I missed that stupid little ball. 

In perusing the Play Store the other day, I stumbled upon a game just as minimalistic, as complex, and absolutely addicting as PONG.  It’s called (drumroll, please)….

ULTRAFLOW

This free game gives you a limited number of bounces to get the disc through different mazes to the target. There are 99 levels and:

• there’s no score
• no timer

• and the BEST part:  NO ADS or invasive permissions required!

   

I breezed through the first 8 levels and then started to sweat. Sometimes I found it a little difficult to figure out how to navigate the mazes and my disc broke up.  Grrrrrr! It was frustrating, but I realized that the key wasn’t always speed. Sometimes slowing down helped me achieve my goal.


Again, the graphics are simple so you can really concentrate on the game. The music is also inoffensive and more like white noise. The fact that the background is dark means it saves on battery power and the app boasts almost no memory consumption.

This is a great game for anyone! and I have not been able to put it down!

I especially recommend it for kids since there’s absolutely NOTHING OFFENSIVE to watch out for! No ads and no special permissions make it great for kids 8 and up.


Download it, play it, and then hand your device to your child. The game is optimized for a wide range of phones and tablets and plays beautifully on all.



For more information or to play the web version of the game, visit http://ultraflow.net/.

Please note:  This article first appeared on www.thegeekparent.com.

Three "Do Not Miss" FREE Apps

My Samsung Confuse, errr..Infuse, died the other day without so much as a whimper or a cough. That was fine because I was ready for an upgrade anyway. I wanted the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, but settled for the Note 2 because it was much cheaper. Anyway, while I'm still in the trial period of the phone, I thought I'd try out some new (for me) apps from Google Play Store. For my reviews of child-related apps, please visit www.thegeekparent.com. Note: one of the ways I choose my apps is based on what permissions the manufacturers ask the user to give. For more information on why you MUST care, visit http://thegeekparent.com/is-installing-that-app-compromising-your-privacy.

Here we go:

94 Seconds – In this category word game, you are given one category and one letter to use to discover a word. For example, you're asked to find a mammal that starts with the letter C or a car company that starts with the letter T. Four different jokers are available to aid in finding the right answer or set higher scores. It's a fun game that certainly taught me a few things (who knew that zouk was a fast tempo carnival style of music originating from the Caribbean islands – 94 Seconds gave me the word and then I looked it up). I like the fact that I can race against the clock or play in a more relaxed mode. If you're tired of the standard Boggle and Scrabble-types of word games, this is certainly worth a try.


LifeHacker Reader – For some reason, my beloved news feeder, Newshog, no longer carries one of my favorite websites, LifeHacker (www.lifehacker.com). I was dissatisfied by the permissions required of the direct LifeHacker app, so I found this wonderful fan-made, unofficial app for the tech and lifestyle blog I enjoy so much. Thank goodness, because I was really missing those valuable life hacks!


Paper Artist – This was already installed on the phone, but it is available from the Play Store and Diva and I are having oodles of fun with it. Turn any photo into a work of art using different styles of paper and various techniques including pen and pencil, markers, newsprint, pastels, etc. which you can save or share with friends. Above is a photo that Diva took of our cat and which my daughter altered in a matter of seconds; I then uploaded it to the cloud and emailed it to some friends. Paper Artist is amazingly easy to do and a nice diversion when you don't feel like playing a game. Plus, it does things I could NEVER do (i.e. pencil sketch a portrait of Cosy). This is a great app!


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Please check back in with me in a day or so for some tips on how to beat those damn ATM fees which are absolutely disgusting. Pardon me while I calm down....

Come on Spring!