When new parents leave the hospital, they’re charged with keeping track of two infant metrics: How often the new baby is feeding, and how often the new baby requires diaper changes. Total Baby is an excellent tool for doing both—and tracking any other baby miscellanea a parent wishes to define.

This application meets the baseline criteria for any new parent: It can be operated using only one hand by someone who’s operating on approximately 90 minutes of sleep per night. But it’s the thoughtful design touches that make ANDESigned’s $5 app truly useful.

Tracking feedings is where the “pound the phone with one hand in the middle of the night” feature really shines. Anyone who’s nursing can easily tap a button labeled “L” or “R” at the start of a nursing session, then tap it again once they’re done. And for bottle-feeders, there’s the option to log how many ounces the baby took, and at what time.

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Pinheads Party by Republic of Fun is one of the first multiplayer board games to appear on the iPad. It makes excellent use of the iPad’s larger screen and shows plenty of potential, however, the gameplay comes up a little short.

To play Pinheads Party, you’ll need at least four people to form two teams of two people each, but you can add more players so you have up to four teams. Each team takes turns spinning a dial to determine the number of moves to advance their pinhead character around the playing board. The colors on the spaces correspond to one of four categories of challenges: Partial Arts, Wonder Words, Ultra Physical, and Mega Mental. Each successfully completed challenge earns a pin which is inserted into your character—hence the name. Collect eight pins and a bonus challenge first, and you win the game.

The board is beautifully rendered with slick animations and cute characters. The categories of challenges are well intentioned for the most part. Many are a variation on charades or drawing charades, however in most challenges, one team is left to the task of creating the actual clue for the opponent team to communicate to each other. For example, you might be provided with a general category like “movies”, but your opponent decides which specific movie will form the basis of the challenge. In other words, your opponent can determine the difficulty of your challenge by their own selection. This might be fine for very casual gaming, but don’t expect to enjoy any serious competition with such variability incorporated in the challenges. It is unfortunate the developer didn’t create basic databases from which to create specific questions.

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One of my favorite attractions at the 1967 World’s Fair was a lattice of plastic cubes that contained samples of the elements, the basic building blocks of all chemical compounds. The Elements: A Visual Exploration is a brilliant app that brings the elements to life on the iPad, and is every bit as compelling.

The home screen displays a periodic table filled with miniature movies. Tapping on an element expands the movie to fill the screen and shows some basic facts about its physical properties. If you have a live Internet connection, you can learn more about the element’s crystal structure and other characteristics through the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which runs in a window that overlays the main display.

Another button brings up a detailed description along with photos of the element in its various forms. You can spin the images by flicking them with your finger, or you can double tap to enlarge them. You can even display the pictures as stereo pairs that appear in 3-D when you view them through special glasses, which you can order online for about $5.

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