These apps help you navigate the Shore

There's enough summer left for a few more days at the Shore. How about some apps to go along?

UV Detector by Appswell is free and uses your Apple device's location service to display a graphic showing the UV index forecast for your day at the beach. Apply sunblock accordingly.

Beach Safety, from Matthew Jones, is a small free app about the dangers of the seashore for swimmers and surfers - riptides, currents, sharks, and so on, and how to deal with them. This isn't an app you reach for when a riptide has hold of your legs - you'll have to consult it before you get wet. Jones has other beach apps for iPhone, including iSurfer-Surfing Coach, iBobyboard, and iDing Repair, that are 99 cents each.

By the way, on the beach I found I could use my iPhone without worrying too much about sand and sea by tucking it inside a zip-top sandwich bag. No problem. And check your brightness settings to adjust for intense sunlight.

With the glare, the sand, and the salt, I'm not that good with reading at the Shore. But I listen to audiobooks all the time, and there's an iPhone app with a lot of them. They're old - er, classic - books, almost 3,000 of them.

Free Audiobooks from Spreadsong Inc. is not free. It's $1.99. But there's no added charge for any of the books. The titles - public-domain books, from the works of Homer to the almost modern - are recorded by volunteers for LibriVox.org, which also offers its recordings without charge via podcast and iTunes. However, this app adds a number of conveniences, such as organizing the books by genre and popularity and displaying cover art.

When you select a book, the app downloads the first chapter, so you can get listening pretty quickly. Meanwhile, the app continues to download subsequent chapters so they'll be ready to go.

That feature stalled when I first tried the app, on the Charles Dickens novella A House to Let. But it must have been a glitch in my connection, because I switched to Adam Smith's classic on economics, The Wealth of Nations, and the whole thing was on my iPhone by the time I'd heard the introduction.

Blood Beach, the free version by Coresoft Inc., is a game set on a Pacific island beach in World War II. You can burn the hours firing weapons at attacking planes, boats, and soldiers. Unless you're serious about the game, don't hit any of the too-handy prompts to upgrade to the paid version.

Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, an undisguised advertisement for the sunglasses designer Dick's Cottons, is a free app that suggests goofy nicknames in quotes between your first and last name, so you can imagine you are down the Shore with "Snooki" and "The Situation."

From now on, call me "The Future."