This week's App Smart column took you into the wonderful world of retro apps - apps that give you a bit of a blast from your past by emulating things from yesteryear.
Many apps in this class try to recreate past technologies pretty closely, but there are of course other apps that take a retro idea and modernize it. The Sea Battle Live app, free on Android, is an example of a classic kid's board game - Battleship - brought up to date with attractive graphics and neat extras like live online play. The Air Hockey Gold app, free on iOS, takes a similar modernizing approach to the arcade classic air hockey, and even lets you play with two pucks instead of one. No quarters required, and though there's not quite the same effect as slamming yourself around the real table, it's still fun.
Meanwhile there is a different sort of nostalgia app that tries to actually bring the past to the present, using the immersive system of augmented reality. The Historypin app, free on iOS is a collection of location-tagged photos of street scenes from as far back as 1840. They're displayed on a map of your surroundings, but you can also choose to see them layered over the scene through your smartphone's camera. This lets you peek back into the past, as if by magic. The app also lets you upload photos and geotagged text content, if you want to add a recent image or an old photo you've digitized yourself.
The similar app Streetmuseum app has similar augmented reality tricks. It's professionally produced by the Museum of London, though, and has modern imagery and content that'll let you explore all sorts of London's recent past, including Carnaby Street in the รข€˜60s. This app works best wh en you're visiting London, of course.
And don't forget that you can use many apps to record your own memories and view them later, to prompt your own nostalgic trips into the past at a later date. Path, free on iOS and Android is one of the more popular apps at the moment that can help you do this.
