The Week in iOS Apps: Here comes the sun

This week’s roundup includes a cool new way of looking at the sun. Plus, there are apps for seeking real estate, organizing your life, and fighting in the Game of Thrones universe.

By now, you know we’re fans of NASA, space, science, and any app that does cool things with those topics. DIY Sun Science is a free iOS app from NASA that helps young users learn about the sun—either in classroom settings or on their own. It includes live satellite views of the sun, videos, and activities with step-by-step instructions to guide even young users in learning more about our closest star.

Here’s one of the splashier app launches we’ve seen lately: FireChat is an iPhone app that needs neither phone network nor Wi-Fi connectivity to work—all you need is to be near other iPhone users running FireChat, and you can talk to them. (The secret? The app takes advantage of iOS 7’s Multipeer Connectivity Framework.) The idea is to stay in contact with friends at big events where it’s easy to get separated, but it could also be a way to meet new people.

This new iPad game based on the HBO series features 2500 quests, hundreds of adventures, more than a million players, and no nudity.

The $2 Next for iPad works as a standalone expense-tracking app in combination with its $2 iPhone predecessor. The app graphs a user’s spending data, letting them view where they might be spending too much—or even parts of the budget that could use bulking up. Data can be exported to Excel or Numbers spreadsheets, backed up via AirDrop or iMessage, or synced to your iPhone using iCloud.

The name of this $3 iPhone app is supposed to remind you of the word “queue”—get it? Anyway, this task manager has a clean, friendly swipe-based interface that reminds us quite a bit of one of our other favorite productivity apps, Any.do. Subtasks can be created within tasks, recurring events can be scheduled, and reminders scheduled for specific or “relative” times. This week’s update to the still-new app fixed a few bugs.

Version 4.9 of this free app for iPhone and iPad offers one cool new feature: a schedule of open houses in the area where users might be seeking a new home. The app also features a “Recommended for You” section that features personalized recommendations for the home-seeker.

Blast that belly fat! This free app for iPhone and iPad has long featured exercises and videos to help users achieve their most beautiful body. Version 2.0 includes a “body fat visualization” to help users see their ideal range, instructions available in Turkish and Brazilian Portugese, heart rate integration, and more than 50 new “tips of the day.”

An app for word lovers, Thesaurasize bills itself as “the largest collection of synonyms, traditional and nontraditional, for the English language that can be found anywhere, and growing more and more each day.”

Twitter has added photo tagging ... the Fleksy keyboard app (pictured) has added support for eight new languages ... and Codea has been rebuilt with a new code editor.