While we’ve been looking at various new ways to interact with sheet music on the iPad at the 2013 NAMM show this week, here’s an app that takes sheet music and brings an entire orchestra along for the ride.
You can take this free iPad app out for a spin and it will turn the page for you as well as let you play along with Piano, Cello, Violin, Viola, Guitar, Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Recorder, Clarinet, Trumpet, Saxophone, Horn, or Voice. Calling this “augmented sheet music,” the app brings the same service from the Weezic website to your iPad in a native app.
Vine is a new, free toy from Twitter. It replaces text with video, but only six seconds of it at a time, shot instant-by-instant. And it’s much cooler than I expected it to be.
Regularly $0.99, Screen-Recorder is available now for free on the Mac App Store, letting you capture video of your Mac’s screen for no money at all.
Version 3 came out in January of last year, while the original app was released in May of 2011. The latest update brings some minor bug fixes to the table, along with the price drop to free.
Pangolin is a cute little puzzle-platformer for iOS that might either drive you mad with rage or mad to the point of insanity. Or both. It’s tricky, challenging, and offers plenty of repeat play opportunities.
If you’ve been around on the internet for any length of time, you’ll have probably heard about a site called Xtranormal, which converts text you enter into a simple little video starring cute animal characters. (If you haven’t heard of it, go and have a play there now, it’s fun.)
Tellagami is a new free iOS app that does something similar. I say “similar”, but the two are not in the same league. Tellagami is very simple, and its features limited. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it, though.
Move over, Mojang! The Blockheads, inspired by such open-world exploration games as Mojang’s certified hit, Minecraft, is the best implementation of the genre yet, out Minecrafting even the official Minecraft game released for iOS some time ago.
You start the game as either a single or 2 player experience. The two player game promises online multiplayer with voice chat via Game Center, while the single player is what I’ve spent my afternoon messing with on both my iPhone and iPad mini. It’s seriously sticky, with all the kinds of things that made me sink hundreds of hours into the Mac version of Minecraft a couple of years ago. There’s crafting and mining, day and night cycles, sleep, a huge open world to explore, and more.
The best ideas are famously (stereotypically, perhaps) captured on the back of a napkin. That’s the thing that’s been closest to hand at a zillion restaurant or coffee shop tables when great minds have got together and come up with something new.
Ink is a new, free digital napkin for the modern era. It’s also an exercise in minimalism, designed to replicate that napkin and the pencil you’d scribble on it with and nothing more.
Izik is a new web search app from the makers of Blekko, a web search engine for people who are looking for a change from Google.
You could be forgiven for saying “Blekwhat?” there. Although it’s been around for a few years now, Blekko isn’t what most people think of when they go looking for somewhere else to search.
But that doesn’t mean you should dismiss it without trying it. Blekko does search pretty well in your browser, and this app is a decent attempt to do search differently on your iPad too.