I have a new best friend. His name is iChalky. I know I’m probably the last person in the world to meet him, and thus his awesomeness is not new to any of you. But he’s so cool, he deserves to be spoken of again and again.

iChalky is one of many physics-using apps on the App Store. And yeah that’s cool, you tip him around the screen and he struggles to stand up. You can grab him and drag him, and that’s okay too. If that’s all he did, the novelty would wear off quickly. But wait, there’s more…

iChalky can dance! And, mate, he’s a much better dancer than me (which isn’t hard of course - though I think that dangley arm move and that rubbery legs one he got after seeing me dancing after a thimble of anything remotely alcoholic.)

I could explain all the technicalities of the physics involved in making him move, but that’d just hurt both of us. So lets just put it down to magic.

You can also replace his face with one from your photo album, which is really neat, coz now it looks like I can dance.

And something else fun he does: since his dancing is based on beat and rhythm from sounds he hears, he goes nuts when I start typing.

The only feature he’s missing is he can’t dance to the music on your iPhone. And the developer says he doesn’t dance on the iPod touch coz of the lack of a microphone. Be interested to know if he dances when you’ve got an external mic.

iChalky(app store link) is my new best friend. And most favourite app.

Look out “So You Think You Can Dance”, here comes iChalky!

Here’s a demo someone did with an earlier version: