The Weird World of Nintendo Switch Applications [Non-Games on the eShop]

y'all know you can play games on your switch but I've been keeping my eye on this market of non games applications that turn your switch into something else like a musical instrument or a drawing tablet or something that it's clearly not and no I'm not talking about lab oh not breaking out that cardboard again I've been dabbling around with these apps and it's been kind of reminding me of when the iPhone first came out and everyone was trying to make simple stupid apps for it just to say they ha

d apps on the iPhone yeah well not many of these are any good either before we get into this let's take a look outside of ourselves let's put ourselves in the shoes of somebody maybe a child whose only portable electronic device is a Nintendo switch maybe they had a particularly good Christmas and they had to choose between getting a Nintendo switch or a cheap iPad maybe they don't even have a cell phone or maybe they do have a cell phone but it can't even buffer YouTube correctly or maybe it ju

st looks like this so they're gonna want there a Nintendo switch to be very versatile somebody like you or me you might have a plethora of different devices that they could watch internet videos on the Nintendo switch is going to be my last choice but I remember being a kid and spending a Christmas gift on a Panasonic d-snap camera because it took digital videos and it played mp3s it did neither of those too well but it was able to do both so it was worth it and now that that's all out of the wa

y we can go back to looking at the Nintendo switch as a full-grown adult with expendable income so I can trash on these stupid apps there were two apps that came into the news recently that kind of inspired this video the first of which is simply called piano a very simple app that just gives you playable piano and a couple of baked in royalty-free songs to play along with the trouble already starts when you open the app you have to tap the icon or else it won't launch the game mode now even tho

ugh there's button prompts on-screen you can touch the screen to strike a key which is relieving the black keys aren't pressable which is revolting but okay this is an app for little kids like a toy piano but you might notice something way more egregious going on or maybe you're like me and it might take a moment for it to sink in doesn't look right so that X the one that has X above it that's an extra oh that's that's what's throwing me off yes so the X key doesn't actually belong there they ju

st straight up added an additional key thankfully the keys are actually in the right order the black keys are just the design they're completely arbitrary and mean nothing now I don't like being the one that makes fun of somebody for just doing their job but my god man as the designer of this app you had one job and that was to make a keyboard look like a keyboard and you just it all up functionally they just added an additional C key at the end here which is pretty normal to do there's usually

a C key at the beginning and a C key at the end but visually it's wrong throws everything off oh maybe that's why they did it so you could play Mary Oh again it's probably for little kids so it shouldn't be that big of a deal and I shouldn't be getting this worked up about it but there's a learn to play section if a parent gets this for their kid their kid will learn to play it this way and the parents will be so proud and then one day they'll be out and about somewhere and they'll see a piano a

nd they'll go oh little Timmy want you to go over there and play us are you sleeping and the kid will walk over there and confidently play are you sleeping wrong because he's so used to having half the keys shifted over also this app is ten dollars and the two minutes we've been talking about it in them like ten seconds of gameplay footage I've shown you that's the whole app for ten dollars you could also buy Sonic mania on sale right now you can buy exit the gungeon whenever you could buy Jedi

Academy you can buy this publisher has a bunch of shovelware on the switch right now all for ten dollars like a blackjack game a darts game a slots game all for ten dollars but the slots games only two dollars on sale right now so go nuts they also have a game called bomb which is the saddest of Bomberman clone I have ever seen the second app that inspired this video isn't actually out yet it's a drawing app called colors live which actually looks pretty cool the original colors came out on the

DS you can now find a slew of time-lapse drawings from over 10 years ago on YouTube just search colors for DS drawing it it's very hard to find any good footage of this stuff I had my TAS with me I would do it for you there was also a successor on the 3ds complete with the layers it's a pretty robust drawing out considering the hardware that it's on now the same people that made those apps want to bring one to the Nintendo switch so they've started a Kickstarter I don't know about this the DES i

n the 3ds both came with a stylus so it was natural to want to draw on those and back in those days not everybody had a phone in their pocket that was capable of running more robust software than this their strategy for getting around the stylus problem is by developing their own pressure sensitive styles pressure sensitivity is very useful for drawing absent or digital artists it's what Wacom built an entire company around and made a killing on it so Apple came around and gave them some well-ne

eded competition forcing them to lower their prices but a pressure-sensitive stylus needs to be powered and it needs to communicate with the switch in some way so it will have a cable and connects to the headphone jack of the switch it must be aggravating as a developer to know that the Nintendo switch has bluetooth built-in but Nintendo won't let you access that functionality for sure drawing tablets are something that I no doubt about so this actually really interests me the app itself looks p

retty cool or at least the prototype for the app itself looks pretty cool it looks like it has all of the makings of a robust drawing app it kind of reminds me of something like Correll painter the demo drawings they have are really spectacular but in this entire demo video you never see the app actually in use just time-lapse footage exported from the app and some direct feed gameplay of gallery navigation wait you can there it is up there it goes not wait there there it is enhance ah the fact

that it needs a peripheral is a little scary that never usually goes very well I really nerd out about drawing technologies so this really interests me but I gotta stop looking at this like it's some professional tool it's just an app for a video game console I'm sure that it'll be more than capable I just hope that it's not that expensive especially with the stylus peripheral and I hope it's usable and cheaper without that peripheral as I'd imagine that's how most people would use this thing ap

ps like flipnote were great and popular because of their limitations there's still a whole unity around that style of animation the bundle with the stylus is a $38 Kickstarter reward right now hopefully it stays around that price point when it finally makes it to retail they've already blasted past the Kickstarter goal next is coloring book guess what that does also it's completely free which is nice well it's nicer than spending ten dollars on a piano app that is wrong what's cool about this ap

p is that you can't actually color outside the lines once you put your finger down you're locked in there oh you can color outside the lines I was using the wrong tools I was surprised to find out that you can use the jaikon and you can use two at once so two people can color at the same time so you can play along with your small child I actually think that's kind of cool after seeing everything piano had to offer this is actually pretty cool functionality it also saves your paintings when you'r

e done the pages are all just generic animals and junk but there's also some cut the rope illustration you can color over as far as I know these developers have nothing to do with each other I don't know why there's a cross over here there's also a free drawing whiteboard looks like colors has some competition now you may be asking yourself what's the catch why is this free well because with just a few clicks you can buy additional coloring book pages the first bundle on the eShop if you happen

to mash a is 8 bucks so if you're gonna get this for a kid put a parental lock on it so that they can't make any in-app purchases or just don't save your credit card information to their switch look I don't know I people do it I'm the only want to use my switch I'm gonna any little demons run around there's also comic book reader apps like inky pen and is naio inky pen actually has some pretty cool stuff on there they have publishers like Dark Horse and IDW which means that you got stuff like tr

ansformers Sonic the Hedgehog and Ninja Turtles stuff like that they've also recently added a bunch of manga my brother did a pretty in-depth video on inky pen when it first came out so I won't spoil the details here if you're very interested in that go check out that video but since then they've made some updates that directly address some of the concerns that he had so why don't we shoot on all over to Long Island so we can hear a little quick update on how it's going keep ends going now uh in

ky pen my old friend it's been a little over a year since we first looked at this strange little app on the Nintendo switch well in the time since my initial look at the platform they have made some sizable updates for one thing they now have manga they seem to think this is the most important thing they've done in the past years so let's just get that out of the way first but reality they've made two major updates that I think help the platform a lot for one thing they've added vertical reading

so now you can read the pages of a comic like you would on any other device like an iPad or a Kindle Fire now admittedly the switches screen size and it's particularly large bezel don't really make it an optimal reading experience like it would be on say an iPad but it works pretty well and I prefer it's so much more than the previous method of reading it from top to bottom like a web page now I can actually read my comic like an actual comic I mean I was able to read the mask on the bus on my

switch pretty clearly I could see everything that was happening on the page the only real issue is that it doesn't auto rotate you have to go in manually and set it to read in vertical mode and it doesn't remember the setting when you back out of one comic and enter into another one you have to reset it every time you want to read something and speaking of the mask on the bus I was able to read that without having to renew my Inca pen subscription they have added a ton of free comics for you to

read without having to pay $7.99 a month this way you can try the surface out before you commit for the long haul it actually made me put in my credit card information and pay for one month in order to even get into the app look it could find a way around that maybe I can cancel it it may actually have a lot of really good stuff that you can just read for free most of valiance content is available for free on inky pen without a subscription so now you can read James Amos is run on quantum and wo

ody and you can stop hearing me go on about it it's a very good app with a lot of potential has a lot of great publishers on board but it doesn't have everyone particularly it does not have Marvel DC or Image Comics it is reasonably priced at $7.99 a month the comiXology unlimited is cheaper has more publishers on board and it's available on more than device but at the end of the day I am comfortable with recommending Enki pen if you want to read comics on your switch they've done a lot to make

the service much more appealing than it was a year ago and if they can keep adding to it maybe put it on more platforms and definitely add more publishers to the service then I think there's a bright future for this little app that could unless of course comiXology comes to the switch in which case a key pen is kind of hey thanks will and then there's also is Mayo with significantly worse comics from the intro video it looks like they seem to focus more on their manga library but overall it isn'

t as good as in keeping it legitimately takes forever to load anything there's other more popular apps for the Nintendo switch like the YouTube app like the Hulu app but it's still not gonna be my go-to video streaming device there's no Netflix app which would be nice but what I think is weirder is that there's no twitch app it's a gaming console people could use their switch as a little tablet to read chat that would be awesome and of course this Pokemon home which just allows you to manage you

r Pokemon from all your different Pokemon games these are all boring them we can realistically speculate about what apps we'd like to see on here like a Netflix app but I wanted to talk about the weird like is the world really ready for a professional drawing app on the Nintendo switch is it something that the market really needs right now LeBeau has shown us that there's a lot you can do with his hardware so what other weird third-party software could we potentially see on this thing and what d

o you guys think about what you've seen so far have you found any uses for any of these apps have I left any apps out I legitimately don't think I have there isn't that much leave it in the comments below at me on Twitter and all this other social media garbage course we've got new videos and livestreams here all the time schedules a tap-in tweet over on Twitter we got wolf then live every single Wednesday a p.m. Easter time there's been some clips thrown in here from Wolf Den live you missing o

ut if you're not hanging out over there we also got streams over on twitch.tv slash Wolf Den the schedules sporadic go drop a follow make sure you get the notifications on so you know what I'm like I might be live right now while I'm watching this and of course the most important thing that you can do to help us out it's just subscribe and share this video with a friend a friend who might be able to do some cool stuff with these apps or maybe you just want to show them the garbage this thing has

to offer thank you guys very much lucky faces