This week we have apps that will help you to learn everything about your guitar, read up on the latest news, and use the Touch Bar to edit text on your MacBook Pro. But who are we trying to fool with all those? This weekend you’ll all be playing Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition all day long.
Guitar Gravitas
Photo: Mad Harmony
Musicians need a reference from time to time, for learning, for quickly checking something out, or for finding inspiration.Guitar Gravitas is my favorite guitar chord and scale app right now. I like it because everything you need to see is presented on one screen, so tapping to switch views is eliminated. You can switch keys, pick scales, and everything else, all with a single tap on this main screen. It’s pretty great.
Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: $5.99
Get it from: App Store
Lire RSS news reader
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Lire has been around for a while, but this week it added a huge new feature: Drag and drop. Now you can grab any news story and drag it either to Lire’s own drop-shelf (iPhone and iPad), or to another app (iPad). It really makes great use of iOS 11’s drag-and-drop. Lire connects to services like Newsblur, or Feedly, and automatically collects all new stories from your favorite websites. The interface is a little ugly at times, but you can fix that with some tweaking.
Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: $6.99
Get it from: App Store
BBEdit adds Touch Bar support for MacBook Pro
BBEdit, the Mac text editor that was born in 1992 and has been going strong ever since, has aded Touch Bar support. Now you can perform all the greatest-hit operations by touching the tiny display above your MacBook Pro’s keyboard, instead of using the actual keyboard. Operations like:
- Toggle the sidebar and previous/next document navigation.
- In FTP/SFTP browser windows: “go up”, “go down” (into selected folder), and “reload”
- In editing windows: toggle the sidebar and previous/next document navigation.
The TouchBar is great, because it combines the uncertain, shifting content of an on-screen menu with the tiny size of a keyboard key. Who doesn’t like to peer at an extra keyboard row in order work out what those virtual keys will trigger?
Available for: Mac
Cost: $49.99
Get it from: Bare Bones
Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition
Imagine if Square Enix’s turn-based Final Fantasy series was translated from the world of chocobos and moogles, and into a place resembling our world of automobiles and selfish consumption. That’s Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition, a version of the classic series reworked for iOS, with simplified controls (battles are automatic, for example), and a band of heroes dressed like kids about to go carry out a mass shooting at their high school.
Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free/$20
Get it from: App Store
