Get set for a weekend road trip with today’s leading Fresh iPhone App, RoadNinja. The app just went through a big update and helps users find points of interest related to highway exits, like restaurants, bathrooms and more. While you’re on the road, you can use Flipbook HD on your iPad to create some cartoons by drawing and animating them right in the app. Side-scrolling action title Gene Effect, a game about exploring and mining distant planets, kicks off the weekend’s games, and is followed up by the brain-teasing puzzler Hareep.

RoadNinja update (iPhone, iPad) Free

Travel app Road Ninja is designed to help you get the most out of road trips by making them easier on you. The app keeps track of where you are using your iOS device’s GPS capabilities, and then uses that information to scan for restaurants, gas stations, points of interest and other stops you might make along the way to your destination, making it easy to find what you want and need exactly when you want or need it.

Road Ninja just received a big update that includes a new user interface and the addition of new features. Probably the most useful is the inclusion of gas prices on the maps it provides, but the app also includes the ability to access Google Street View pictures of venues and other locations. It also has undergone some handy bug fixes to make the whole experience better.

Flipbook HD (iPad) $4.99

If you’re interested in animation, you’ll want to check out Flipbook HD. The drawing app turns your iPad into an animation studio, allowing you to draw your cartoons on the app and then animate them with simple-to-use touch controls. You can also import videos and other elements to add to or fill out your work.

Flipbook HD allows you to draw your animation frame by frame, or edit the video created by it by adjusting elements and keyframes. When you’re finished with the whole project, you can share it using email, saving it to your camera roll or sharing it on flipbook.tv. You can also take stills of frames from within the animation and share those, too.

Gene Effect (iPhone, iPad) $4.99

A side-scrolling action-adventure title, Gene Effect puts you in the role of the captain of a small mining vessel and rescue ship, exploring a distant planet. Your goal in each level is to explore the underground caverns in which you work, as well as bring back artifacts, fossils and various kinds of ore. Navigating the caves quickly and efficiently and finding and extracting resources count toward your score and allow you to earn trophies in each stage.

Gene Effect is also about exploration, and as the story unfolds the game becomes about more than just mining. You can also unlock secrets to upgrade your ship and explore the planet to which you’ve been sent. Gene Effect includes 25 music tracks you can unlock for performing well throughout the game, too.

Hareep (iPhone, iPad) $0.99

Puzzler Hareep is about helping a bird reach its nest and babies by crossing a dangerous grid littered with deadly obstacles. Each level is a complex puzzle in which you’ll have to gather elements that allow you to circumvent each obstacle, among them laser beams and bombs. As you tap around each level, Hareep will pick up cards that allow it to place things like mirrors to reflect lasers or wrenches to rotate objects.

The difficulty starts out pretty high and stays there, requiring players to carefully move around each level while bouncing lasers to explode bombs and clearing the bird’s path. The game features 45 levels when you download it and more can be purchased, and it also packs a level editor that allows you to create your own stages and share them with other players.

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