The Apple Pencil stars this week, but not how you’d think. Instead of writing or drawing with it, you can use it to bow a virtual violin. Musicians will also love a new iPhone app which comes up with melodies and harmonies for you.
And that’s just the beginning.
Fortamento
Photo: Cult of Mac
Fortamento is a song ideas generator for iPhone music, and it comes up with an endless supply of surprisingly fresh and useful melodies and chord progressions. You can pick the song’s key and tempo, choose the instruments that play the harmony and melody, and even tweak individual notes before exporting the whole thing to a bigger music app via MIDI.
If you’re a musician, and you have an iPhone, you should buy Fortamento immediately.
Available for: iPad
Cost: $0.99
Get it from: App Store
Pen2Bow
Pen2Bow turns the Apple Pencil into a virtual violin bow.
Pen2Bow takes the information from Apple Pencil’s powerful sensors, and sues it to play a violin, turning the Apple Pencil into an expressive violin bow. You can squeeze a huge amount of expressiveness from the little white stick, depending on how hard you press on the iPad’s screen, how fast you move it, and even the angle at which you tilt the thing.
Available for: iPad
Cost: $7.99
Get it from: App Store
Scanbot 7
Photo: Scanbot
Scanbot 7 is one of the top two paper-scanning apps for iOS (the other is Readdle’s Scanner Pro), and version 7 adds a whole slew of new features. For instance, there are several new filters which process the captured images for better looking scans. These are tailored to work with B&W documents, colored images, and grayscale scans.
Also significant is Smart Search, previously only available on the Android version of the app. This lets you tap on things like tags, locations labels, and dates, and instantly see other matching scans.
Scanbot 7 is also free top download, so it’s worth checking out even if you already use something else.
Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free (with in-app purchases)
Get it from: App Store
Pages
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote all got updated to version 4.0 in the last week, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The big new features is Apple Pencil support, which coincides with the realest of the new low-end iPads. Pages gets the biggest set of changes, with supports for creating ebooks. It’s not as powerful as iBooks Author on the Mac, but it’s more than good enough to get the job done. Better still, the new tools make creating reports on the iPad and the Mac into a delightful task, instead of a dreaded chore.
Available for: iPhone, iPad, Mac
Cost: Free
Get it from: App Store, Mac App Store
