• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 16, 2015

In some way apps have become an unremarkable part of daily life, without a lot of surprise left in the platform Still, that's not entirely true. I continue to be delighted by some innovations -- even slight ones --  in the app ecosystem.

This is as good a time as any to catch up on some apps that have managed to survive on my phone deck and its regular purging.

SNL: The app celebrating the 40^th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live” is among the best video apps I have ever seen. Once you've used it, at next launch it autoplays a clipstream  targeted to your previous usage.  It knows which "SNL" seasons  you like. Even better, the lateral navigation is sublime, letting you easily follow actors and seasons so fluidly you'll find that an hour of viewing has passed by before you know it. If only YouTube were this good.

StyleIt: This app creates ensembles for you based on direct input or a photo you take of any article of clothing you have. My wife has already endorsed this app as the kind of thing she thinks app makers should be doing, giving her ideas for pulling together looks. Even though the m-commerce links the app offers are way out of her price range, it feeds her imagination in just the right ways.

Sinatra: Billed as an “appumentary,” this 100-year anniversary celebration of all things Frank is rare for the genre. . The interface is as smooth as the chairman of the board’s own voice, and there is always something fresh to hear or see, with new sections, audio clips, images and more. There have been a number of attempts at creating apps around legendary musical figures – The Who, Dylan, etc. This is among the only ones that I find focused and sticky.

Periscope: I admit I was skeptical about the real uses of spontaneous live personal broadcasting. But once I subscribed to a fair range of interesting media sources, the app provided some welcome interruptions in my day. Sites like Mashable now do regular news updates on Periscope. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes broadcasts from Ellen DeGeneres, and Cosmopolitan  and Seventeen magazines. I wish more let their videos be archived for later reference. But I can see the glimmer of future live video programming conventions.

Timeline: Lately it seems that everyone wants to reinvent the news for mobile consumption. One of the coolest efforts I have seen is Timeline, an app that is all about context. It takes both current news and serendipitous topics and puts them into a historical timeline that explains how the issue evolved, sometimes over hundreds of years. From Hillary Clinton’s backstory to the history of the sneaker, the interface structures long-form content into a timeline that collapses and lets you dance around and dive into the details. This is one of the more interesting models for mobilized content I have seen.

That's it for now. But feel free to share below the apps that -- perhaps to your own surprise -- have stuck on your smartphone deck longer than you would have thought.