Fresh iPhone Apps for Sep. 30: Quora, Chefs Feed, Pig Curling, Robotriot – iPhone app article – Phil Hornshaw

Question-and-answer community website Quora has finally come to the iTunes App Store with an app that taps you in to experts, community members and anyone else who can dish out information when you need a question answered. Read about it below, and then get some more specific answers from Chefs Feed, an app that gets restaurant recommendations from actual chefs, rather than just other users. Pig Curling is exactly what it sounds like and is a fun casual game to take into the weekend with you, while Robotriot will satisfy any cravings for old-school side-scrolling platformers and fighting robots.

Questions and answers – that’s Quora’s bag (Q or A – get it?) and now you can tie into the online community used by many to quickly ask and answer questions on all manner of topics. That’s 60,000 topics, to be precise, and many of them location-based. If you want to learn about something, post a question and you’ll get answers back as quickly as community members can respond. If you’ve got an insight to share, you can do that on the fly as well, using your device’s Wi-Fi or 3G Internet capabilities.

Quora is populated by experts in a lot of fields, so asking questions will often yield very useful answers. you can also use the topical organization to learn about topics you’re interested in by reading the questions of others and the answers they receive. Quora is also a handy traveling tool, with the ability to get information on nearby locations using your iOS device’s GPS capabilities.

You’ve probably seen restaurant guides that give you recommendations from restaurant reviews or from other users and friends, but you’ve likely never seen one that shows you where chefs like to eat. That’s Chefs Feed, a restaurant recommendation app that polls true food experts and finds out what they like in a variety of genres and categories.

Chefs Feed is launching in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles and includes 100 of the best chefs from those cities. you can search for particular chefs and their restaurants by quality and category, and you can even see those chefs’ favorite dishes at various establishments. If you’re hungry enough, the app carries a feature that finds you a great chef-recommended dish at a restaurant nearby, using your device’s GPS capabilities.

The premise here is pretty simple. It’s curling, the Winter Olympic sport popular in Canada, in which a team throws a rock down an icy stretch to try to hit a spot on a bullseye to score points. But instead of a rock, you throw picks. it sounds weird because it is, but Pig Curling gains a lot from replacing stones with swine, like various kinds of pigs that can go further or bash through obstacles (and yes, there are lots of obstacles with which to deal). the more points you score in each level and the more pigs you leave on the bullseye, the better your rank for each stage.

You’ll use seven different kinds of pigs to score points and deal with four different kinds of surfaces for your curling levels. there are 40 levels available in the game, and you’ll also be able to earn achievements and rank up on global leaderboards, thanks to Game Center support.

Robots need fighting, I guess, which is why there are so many apps that concern battling renegade machines equipped with scary weapons. in Robotriot, you play a robot tasked with raiding the ships of other robots in a side-scrolling adventure game, not unlike classic titles such as Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from the console side, or Robot Wants Kitty from the iTunes App Store. in each level, you’ll have to fight off renegade robots while you learn how to move through each stage, find the generator and destroy it.

You’ll work through 12 different levels in this sci-fi platformer, and face off against 13 different kinds of robotic enemies along the way. You’ll also fight off bosses and gather weapons upgrades to further your warlike robotic ends.