The Week in iOS Apps: Avant-garde

This week’s roundup brings us apps for music, for weather, for movie-watching and picture-taking. It’s true: iPhones and iPads can do just about anything.

This app from Agile Bits has always had a simple goal: Simplify your digital life by remembering all your passwords for you, thus requiring only that you remember the password to 1Password itself. The latest generation of the app—an $8 offering for iPhone and iPad—keeps the tradition alive, but with a wholly redesigned user interface, a new “Web mode” that includes a full browser, new form-filling options, support for 12 languages, and many more new items.

If you love the photos you’re taking on your iPhone, but don’t like your printing options, Flicpost might be what you’re looking for. It lets you choose photos from your phone’s photo library, and create 5-by-7-inch prints, sent anywhere in the world you choose. Sending a pic anywhere in the United States costs just 69 cents; rates in the rest of the world can run up to a dollar per print.

Sometimes we’re not sure how much we should explain games like the $1 Monsters, Inc. Run for iPhone and iPad, because, hey: Mike! Sulley! Boo! You’ve known and loved these characters for 11 years now. Your kids have grown up with them! That’s why they make the game! What we can tell you: This is basically a Pixar twist on the old Super Mario Bros. game, but with Mike! Sulley! Boo! Sometimes it’s simply nice to game with old friends.

Our avant-garde pick of the week, the $10 Rework app for iPhone and iPad offers a series of Philip Glass compositions, remixed with a bit of a dance edge to them, accompanied by “interactive visualizations” that might very well blow your mind. It comes from the makers of Bjork’s Biophilia app.

It seems like there’s a race on lately to come up with a weather app that can both A) convey the most information and B) do it in the most stripped-down fashion, so that the user might comprehend their entire climate in a single glance. The $2 Today Weather app for iPhone is the latest such entry in the competition.

For the skeuomorphically inclined comes Turnplay, a $2 iPad app that simulates the look and feel of a vinyl record turntable. It accesses your iTunes library directly and you can play the music at 33 or 45 RPM; you can even place the needle on the record at the location where you want to start listening. Best of all, you can even run your music backward on it. Now you can find out for sure if Paul is dead.

The free iPad app for Time Warner Cable subscribers was updated this week to include video-on-demand for thousands of shows and movies.

The $3 Wheel of Fortune app for iPhone and iPad celebrates the TV show’s 30th anniversary—an accomplishment that makes us feel old. Instead of offering a retro-gaming experience, though, the app is a straightforward recreation of the game you’ve long known and loved on TV. The difference? If you win, you won’t actually make a fortune. Wheel! Of! Pleasant Diversion!

Joke all you want, Google lovers: Yahoo! Mail is still one of the biggest email providers in the world. The service’s new iPhone app makes it easier to manage messages and attach photos to outgoing communications. It actually doesn’t look all that different from Gmail’s recently revamped app.

Amazon Instant Video has added iPhone support … Google Maps is finally available for the iPhone … Flickr’s iOS app has been redesigned … Instagram has a new filter and other improvements … and Shazam has a new tagging interface and other updates.