What's in store for next year?

Every year about this time I start thinking about the new year, about how it always seems like an opportunity for a fresh start. Since reading tarot cards is one of my hobbies, I naturally turn to them at the first of the year, looking for insight into what the new year may bring. Several times in the past I have looked for tarot apps for the iPhone or iPad, and have downloaded several, but they were always disappointing. I have a couple of apps that are beautiful, but if you don’t immediately remember to save the reading, it’s lost forever. I have also seen ones where the card meanings are poorly translated from other languages, or where the interface is unattractive or clunky.

This weekend I spent some time looking through the apps in the app store again, hoping to find something new, and I was thrilled to find that Lo Scarabeo, the Italian publisher well known for beautiful tarot cards, has created three new tarot apps, and they are wonderful! There is a free app called LS Tarot Lite, which gives you a two-card “Daily Insight” reading, and gives you a feel for the complete app before you spend any money. The second is a $4.99 app called LS Tarot, which contains six spreads and one deck, The Universal Waite. The LS Epic Tarot, for $9.99, contains twelve spreads, and allows you to download five additional decks from a selection of around 50.

There are all kinds of customization options–you can choose to use reversals or not, you can change the background to one of the many that they offer, or you can set it to an image from your photo gallery. All of your readings are saved in a reading history. You can delete a reading from the history if you wish, but all readings are saved in the history by default, you don’t have to remember to do it ahead of time. You can also write down your own thoughts about a reading in a reading journal, and print or email a reading to yourself or to someone else. You can choose to use reversals or not, something that many other apps don’t allow–either they only use the upright position, or they include reversals even if you don’t want to use them. The interpretations are written by Jo-Anne Penn-Kast, and can be accessed as full interpretations, or as keywords.

I honestly can’t think of one thing that they didn’t include, or anything that could be done differently, or better. At $9.99, it may seem a bit steep compared to other apps, but in my opinion it’s worth every cent. All three apps come in both iPhone and iPad editions. Unfortunately, they aren’t universal, i.e., if you want it on both an iPad or iPhone, you’ll need to buy both versions. I purchased the $4.99 one for my iPhone, and the Epic version for my iPad.

If you’re looking for a sophisticated, beautiful tarot app, this is the one.

Cross-posted from Propaganda3's blog.