The Week in iOS Apps: Mercy, BeauCoo!

This week’s roundup of iOS apps includes a focus on “body positivity,” healthy eating, and some new new twists on classic games.

We don’t see many apps purporting to promote “body positivity,” but that’s the goal of the free BeauCoo app for the iPhone. The app is aimed at women: It encourages them to input their dimensions so that they can compare clothing brands and styles that are flattering for all sorts of sizes and shapes; users can even share photos while they do their shopping. This week’s update adds an improved store-location function, to help users more easily find what they’re looking for.

Something new for the foodies: Delicion is a free, elegantly designed cookbook app for the iPad, packed with gluten-, grain-, and soy-free recipes. It includes step-by-step instructions and photos for every recipe, and a customizable in-app shopping list.

This $5 personal accounting app for iPad includes more than 50 new features in this week’s update, including the ability to auto-pay scheduled transactions, a checkbook register, and protection for your financial information via an in-app four-digit PIN. Conducting your finances is now easier and safer.

It appears at first glance that the $1 Scraps app for iPhone is a sort of Evernote for haiku writers and dream journalers. Write down your thought, and save it. It’ll be geotagged, and you can organize folders to keep your inspiration orderly.

Full disclosure: During a long hospitalization awhile back, when I was in pain and full of drugs, playing Scrabble HD on my iPad was the only thing that made me feel human again. The $1 game has been updated with a new interface, Retina-friendly graphics, the ability to challenge friends to matches via Facebook, and the option to shift quickly between games if you’re playing more than one friend at a time.

Speaking of classic games: The Sims FreePlay for iPhone and iPad was updated this week to bring an expanded town map, which now includes a movie studio, a real estate building, and new houses. The new version also improves gameplay, making it easier to achieve levels between 30 and 52.

Good news! YouTube Capture—which previously let you record, edit, and upload video directly from your iPhone—was updated this week so that it is native to both the iPad and iPad mini.

This is the first time we’ve suggested an app might be aimed at the die-hard crowd of Music From The Hearts of Space Lovers, but the $3 Vio for iPhone and iPad seems to fit the bill. Sing and it autotunes your voice into a blend of ambient electronic music that you can guide by touching and shifting the starfield on your screen. You’ll, uh, probably want to have plenty of incense handy while you play around with this app.

ActionMovie FX has added new, well, effects … Repix lets users turn photos into masterpiece paintings … and newsreader app Zite has been updated to give users more control over their news sources.