Pocket Informant Pro is a super powerful information manager app with a ton of built in features, along with several that can be purchased as add-ons, increasing the functionality in specific ways.

Now, however, the app's developer has added Evernote support, with a host of ways to integrate your Evernote reminders and other notes right into Pocket Informant Pro. The concept is to bring together everything about your day into one place, and let you customize every part of the app to make it individually useful to you.

Sounds good to me!

Evernote Integration also includes:
* Rich Text Notes
* Lists
* Styles
* Evernote Reminders and todos
* Stacks
* PDFs
* Word Documents
* Images
* Attachments
* Support for Evernote "linked notebooks"

Pocket Gamer Guides are like those console game strategy guides that fill up many a gamer's bookshelves, chock full of background information, concept art, and tactics help.

The Official Companion Guide to Doodle Jump – iPad edition is the latest in a long line of Pocket Gamer Guides, and it promises to have just that:

Everything you need to know about Doodle Jump’s story so far – from its origin, to a difficult start, to global domination

• An in-depth interview with the world’s best Doodle Jumper, including expert tips and exclusive footage of his 24 million highscore run
• Get to know the tactics that will make you a master Doodler (24 million highscore not guaranteed)
• Did you know there’s a nine-foot tall version of Doodle Jump? If it’s Doodle Jump-related, we’ve covered it
• Complete breakdown of the themed versions of the game – what, when, and how to improve at them
• And more fun stuff, including exclusive content to come in future updates

Blocky, gun-toting mercenary John Gore must fight hordes of murderous chefs, giant lumberjacks, killer penguins, three hundred rabbits, an entire undead army, and one single moose in Minigore 2: Zombies.

Lucky for you, he's doing this all for free, for a limited time, as developer Mountain Sheep has dropped the price of its latest dual-stick shooter to zero to celebrate four brilliant years of the Minigore franchise.

Facebook announced that it will be entering the mobile games publishing fray, hoping to help small to medium development teams who "don’t yet have the upfront resources for a paid strategy" go global, according to a report over at Pocket Gamer.

With 800 million monthly mobile users--260 million of those playing games--Facebook has a built-in audience just ready for Facebook-published mobile games. It sounds like a win-win strategy, and ten developers have already signed up.

In an email sent to 148Apps today, Facebook mentioned all ten by name:

The initial partners in the pilot program were identified by their high-quality, high-potential games. These initial partners and games include:

• 5th Planet’s RPG card battle game, Dawn of the Dragons


• Brainbow’s puzzle-packed adventure game, Dr. Newton: The Great Brain Adventure


• Certain Affinity's pirate-themed strategy game, Age of Booty: Tactics


• Dragonplay's social poker game, Live Hold'Em


• Gameloft's medieval strategy/simulation game, Kingdoms & Lords


• Gamevil's train management simulation Train City


• KiwiGames’ quest-based exploration game, Shipwrecked


• Outplay Entertainment's explore-and-battle fantasy game, Monster Legacy


• Space Ape's multiplayer combat strategy game, Samurai Siege


• WeMade Entertainment's endless-running game WINDrunner

While a few of these developers don't fit the "small to medium" developer team model in my opinion (Gameloft, Gamevil, WeMade), it could be a potential windfall for actual indie teams looking to get their well-made game out to a ready audience.

Risk is one of my favorite board games of all time. Schmeuk Studios' Conquist 2 fed my obsession with a pretty spot-on homage to the tabletop game of world domination, and now Conquist Tournament threatens to take up all my free time.

With this new multiplayer-focused game, Schmeuk Studios focused on making everything work smoothly and easily. "No AI player can substitute for a human, so we focused on making the online multiplayer experience great," they said in an email. "Players join matches effortlessly and follow every move in realtime."

The team also created a smarter matchmaking system along with tournaments and leagues that start every two weeks, with trophies and a Hall of Fame. There's even a new scoring system based on the chess championship algorithm (ELO) to accurately reflect players' abilities on the leaderboards.

Added to all that is a new power card system, which bring a whole new element to the gameplay without unbalancing it. The cards will let players camouflage armies, spy on opponents, make surprise air strikes and more, like power ups.

Unlike the other Conquist games, this one's free, so be sure to check it out.

Zagat is the first name in restaurant rating, having started in 1975 to cover just New York eateries and growing to over 70 cities in 2005. Now, Google brings Zagat to the mobile era with Zagat, a free app for your iPhone that covers nine cities, including Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

Features:
- Expert-selected lists of places to go for nearly any occasion, mood, and craving
- Reviews and ratings you can trust
- Constant stream of entertaining articles and videos delivered throughout the day
- Advanced search tools to help you find exactly what you want
- Menus to read before you go
- Reservations through OpenTable

GungHo, the developer behind incredibly successful free-to-play game, Puzzles and Dragons, has a new game out. Titled Freak Tower, it is also a free-to-play game.

While it looks quite a bit like other tower building sims out there, Freak Tower also promises some interesting tower defense mechanics, as well, to liven things up.

Of course, when a studio that reported a $4.9 million daily average sales last quarter releases a new game, it's probably time to try it out at least, right?

Honestly, I just wanted to use the word, "shmup," in a headline.

Also, this game is by Thorsten Fleisch. an artist who makes visually interesting short films, like Energie!, which sort of gives my eyes a workout.

In Teslapunk, you'll be tasked with avoiding bullets and sort of pushing away the enemies with a giant fire-hose-like weapon thing. Sounds like fun, right?

It's free, and the video below has the best presentation of a portrait-orientation iOS game I've seen, so by all means go give this one a try.

Ever wanted to run your own baseball team? Well, the time is nigh, with the recent release of MLB Live Challenge, an interesting mix of fantasy sports and team management sim using real results from Major League Baseball.

Build your own baseball team in MLB Live Challenge, the game that keeps you directly connected to Major League Baseball! Collect Player Tickets featuring real-life pros from all 30 Major League teams and compete using real-world MLB results, updated every day! Do you have what it takes to create the ultimate roster?

Each week, we take a look at the top twenty most recommended iOS apps on Powerslyde. We want to help you find some great apps recommended by app lovers just like you, and maybe help you discover some apps that you might not find on the top apps lists on iTunes.

This week, we've grabbed the top five most recommended apps from Powerslyde:

Fitocracy
Fandango
Flipboard
Car Racing Free (Street Racer)
The Sims FreePlay

Pretty fascinating, if you ask me, and if you're reading this, I'm assuming you would be if you were here. Or something like that.

These are actually the top five most recommended apps on Powerslyde from the past week, a very different list from last week's. To see three big non-game apps at the top of the charts is a neat fact that we tend to overlook in the onslaught of games that take all the headlines these days, it seems.

Fitocracy is like an RPG for fitness, letting you track your entire workout routine in one place, and what better way to stay motivated than through gamification? Fandango is still my go-to app to find movie times and buy tickets when I'm in a hurry or on the go, and Flipboard is at least a weekly read in my house--it's like grabbing the Sunday paper, only it's stuff I want to read.

Having Car Racing Free and The Sims FreePlay--both fun and free games--at the top of the list just re-iterates the triumph of the free to play economy in gaming: if the game is fun, people are going to recommend it, regardless of the economic model supporting the game.

What do you think? Any apps or games you'd recommend beyond these? Sound off in the comments below!

Powerslyde is a mobile app that helps you discover the apps your friends are using, while letting you curate your own recommendation lists.

Grab the free Powerslyde iOS app right here, and help your favorite app get up on the Powerslyde most recommended list.

I just finished reading Will Luton's new book, Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away. It's a $12.99 purchase in the iBooks store, making it a better deal than, say, the current paperback version, at $21.38 over on Amazon.

The book is a healthy roundup of what makes free-to-play (F2P) games tick, with sections on the economics, gameplay, monetization, marketing, and analytics--the underpinnings of any successful free-to-play game on any app store.

The examples he uses within the book are Farmville, naturally, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Bejeweled Blitz. In this way, Luton is able to illustrate his points with concrete examples from real world games that use the principles within.

The author believes that free-to-play games are a win/win proposition, letting developers quickly and inexpensively release games that have a chance of making some money, and letting players who wouldn't typically touch a $60 console "gamers' game" experience fun for no money down. It's a delightful ideal, and I hope most, if not all, developers take it to heart: free-to-play games should be good games first, and monetization engines second. Luton continues to make this point throughout the book, though the message tends to get lost in the discussion of variable reward schedules (the same type of reinforcement schedule slot-machines are built on) and how to analyze key performance indicators.

As a non-developer, I did get lost within the many industry acronyms and other such jargon, but Luton does a good job of helping the novice reader get through it all. The title is clear: this is a book on making games that make money, and the information between the front cover and end flap is focused on that part of game making.

The level of depth and detail that Luton brings to the explanation of how free-to-play games work is astonishing. While the gameplay section, for example, tends to focus on player retention, play sessions, and triggers to keep your players coming back rather than actual game mechanics, it's an interesting read nonetheless. I've definitely increased my understanding of what a complex achievement successful free-to-play games have attained.

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who develops games for iOS or other mobile platforms, as well as readers and writers who want to get a better grasp on the breakout phenomenon of the free-to-play genre. Luton has created a fantastic resource, here.

The book Free-toPlay: Making Money From Games You Give Away, by Will Luton, can currently be found on the iBooks store for $12.99.

Each week, we take a look at the top twenty most recommended iOS apps on Powerslyde. We want to help you find some great apps recommended by every day users like yourselves, and maybe bring to light some apps that might not show up in the top apps lists on iTunes.

Here are five of the most recommended apps this week:

Angry Birds Space
Temple Run
Etsy
Talking Tom Cat
Toshl Finance

Now, that's pretty interesting, right? Angry Birds Space continues to be super popular, perhaps even more so than the fist iteration of the outrageously successful Angry Birds phenomenon. Temple Run was a huge hit, spawning a sequel, and two Disney-branded spin offs as well, but it's the first game that's on the top recommended list here.

Talking Tom Cat is an app that has youngsters talking to an animated cat, who will then repeat the phrases in a funny voice with matching animations; makes a lot of sense it would be recommended by so many folks. The Etsy iOS app packages the crafter's retail site into an on-the-go package, super useful for those who need a hand-made gift on the fly. Toshl Finance is a useful financial app that starts out free; you only need to pay for the features you want.

What do you think? Any apps you'd recommend beyond these? Sound off in the comments below!

Powerslyde is a mobile app that helps you discover the apps your friends are using, while letting you curate your own recommendation lists.

Grab the free Powerslyde iOS app right here, and help your favorite app get up on the Powerslyde most recommended list.

Hey, there are over a billion apps out there, you know? There are only a few featured each week by the App Store, only a tiny fraction make the top paid and free charts, and fewer still are included in Apple's Essentials collections.

What that means is that there are a ton of great apps and games out there that just don't get discovered. Let's remedy that, at least a little bit, with our choices for ten of the most underrated apps on the App Store.

Bird Zapper - Here's one of the more ridiculous match-three offerings out there, with a solidly pleasant presentations, control set, and game mechanics. If you're up for some wacky bird torture and like the zen-like state of mindful repetition, this one's for you.

Epic Win - You know what's boring? To-Do lists. Even worse? Completing them. Chores suck, but Epic Win turns them into a game, offering you experience points and level ups to keep you interested and motivated. I still rock this app on my iPhone.

Hard Lines - Take two time-honored video game genres, the dual stick arcade shooter and Snake, and mash them up. You'll get something like Hard Lines, one of the stickier games out there, one in which the resulting app is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Blocks Cometh - This retro-flavored platformer/jumper should have made a longer lasting splash, what with its look, sound, and solid controls. Regardless, it's a game that you should grab for your iOS device right now; it's that good.

Match Panic - Originally titled Critter Panic, this match three game has it all: pixelly artwork, retro chiptune soundtrack, and the addictive nature of time-based pattern matching. Get ready to bliss out with your iPhone and a set of headphones when you play this fantastic game.

Mint - Honestly, I don't know how I lived or did taxes before Mint, the mobile app version of the award-winning financial web service. I find it surprising, though, how few people know of the service or the app. I'm here to right that wrong, now, by recommending you give it a try.

CardMunch - This LinkedIn-sponsored business card scanning app is probably the best of the ones I've used, but I doubt you've even heard of it. Eclipsed by apps like Evernote Hello, CardMunch seems to do a better job recognizing funky card designs. It also connects right to LinkedIn, which makes a lot of sense for those of us that rely on that for business contacts.

Camera+ - Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time replacing Apple's built-in apps with third-party ones. Part of it is the inability to set other apps as default, and part of it is that Apple's apps work well, and simply. Camera+ is one of the exceptions, as it does so much more to take iPhone photography to the next level. Seriously, get this app.

Knights of Pen & Paper - If you're a closet Dungeons & Dragons fan, you'll already warm to the alliterative title of this smart, tongue-in-cheek homage to fantasy role playing of the analog sort. My kids and I pass the iPad back and forth with this game all the time, even to this day.

Rdio - Poor Rdio, it never gets much love. When I see streaming music mentioned in any type of press, it's always Pandora and Spotify that are mentioned. Rdio is a brilliant internet radio platform, organized more by album for us older music lovers. It's got a great catalog of both popular and more indie music, and just gets better each day. Give it a try for free and see if it works for your brain.

What do the following iOS apps and games have in common? Well, they all surprised the heck out of us when they were released. That's saying something, considering we're all jaded journalists and such.

Apps that come along and knock our socks off are rare, so we've put together a list of ten of the most surprising apps from the last five years of the App Store to commemorate that fact, and to maybe show you some cool stuff you might have missed.

Surprising Apps

These are the apps that came out of left field, making innovative use of iOS hardware and software to bring us a truly unexpected experience.

Hipstamatic - The grandaddy of hipster photo apps, Hipstamatic created the crop and filter genre, with switchable virtual lenses and film types to apply to your ironic images.
Word Lens - Aim your iPhone camera at a sign in another language and see it magically transformed right on your device. If this isn't transformative tech, I don't know what is.
Cycloramic - This one lets you set your iPhone down on a hard surface, then uses the built-in vibration feature to spin around in a circle, taking a 360-degree video of the entire process. Wow!
Dark Sky - This innovative weather app does one thing really well: warn you when it's going to rain. You can even get a 5 minute warning, which is enough to get your umbrella out and stay dry!
Star Walk - Astronomy apps have been all the rage, especially since the iPad came out. But this one lets you hold your iOS device up to the sky, and it will show you what stars and other heavenly objects are up there, in real time. Heck, you can even track Santa with it during the holidays.

Surprising Games

These games either came out of nowhere and burned themselves into the collective unconscious, or were so bizarrely fun and successful that they had to be mentioned here.

Game Dev Story - We've spent entire days in thrall to this cleverly addictive saga of video game development, putting our retro-styled pixel people through their paces to push out the next great hit.
Candy Crush Saga - What's so surprising about a match-three game becoming the top-grossing app in just a few weeks? Well, it's a match-three game.
Tiny Wings - One indie dev, Andreas Illiger, sat down and created this brilliant piece of game design, popularizing the one-touch game genre and garnering a ton of copycat and clone apps in the bargain. Plus, he made a lot of money, which we like to talk about, too.
Angry Birds - Did you ever think that flinging birds in a slingshot at pigs in bizarre structures would turn into a global hit, spawning way too many tie-in items, like fishing lures? Us, neither.
10000000 - Small, brutally difficult indie game that became a smash hit overnight. That's pretty surprising, right?