The best new Netflix, Instagram, news and music apps you’ll find this week

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Read, listen, watch, peer, play.
Read, listen, watch, peer, play.
Photo: Cult of Mac

This week we view Instagram on the Apple Watch, customize Apple Music, and finally remove those terrible auto-playing previews in Netflix.

Clicker for Netflix

Get rid of auto-playing Netflix previews with Clicker.
YES!
Photo: Clicker

To be honest, Clicker is worth the $5 asking price just for one feature: It can stop Netflix’s super-annoying auto-play previews. Other than that, Clicker is a Netflix client app for the Mac. It gives full-screen browsing, auto-resumes the last thing you were watching and offers picture-in-picture support. It even puts Netflix controls in the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar.

It’s hard to see why any Mac-owning Netflix user wouldn’t want this.

Price: $5

Download: Clicker for Netflix

Lens for IG

View photos on a teeny screen.
View photos on a teeny screen.
Photo: Lens

Lens lets you browse Instagram on your Apple Watch. Yes, now you can use your smallest screen to browse photos. You can view stories, search for users, like, comment and reply to direct messages, too. In short, everything but actually posting photos.

Price: Free

Download: Lens for IG from the App Store (iOS)

AUM – Audio Mixer

Check out the new MIDI strip on the left in the AUM audio mixer app.
Check out the new MIDI strip on the left.
Photo: Cult of Mac

AUM is one of a few utterly essential apps for iOS-based musicians. The others are AudioBus and AudioShare (which is from Kymatica AB, the developer of AUM).

This AUM update adds a new MIDI strip, which is like an in-app dock for any and all MIDI apps you might want to use inside the app. That might not sound like much, but if you use AUM as a mixer and host for MIDI, then this is huge. It reduces clutter and makes it far easier to concentrate on making music.

Price: $18.99

Download: AUM – Audio Mixer from the App Store (iOS)

Marvis Pro

Marvis Pro is a nice-looking app with a terrible name.
Nice-looking app; terrible name.
Photo: Marvis

Marvis Pro is a new music app for the iPhone. It’s a replacement for the built-in music app, and its gimmick is its customization. You can customize almost any aspect of the app, to the extent that you can almost replicate the Mac’s smart playlists. Totally worth a look if you want more from a music app.

Price: $3.99

Download: Marvis Pro from the App Store (iOS)

Reeder 4

Reeder looks fantastic, and is very smooth and speedy.
Reeder looks fantastic, and is very smooth and speedy.
Photo: Cult of Mac

After Reeder 3 looked like abandonware for years, developer Silvio Rizzi finally replaced it with a brand-new version. Reeder 4 is an RSS newsreader for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

If you ever used previous versions, you’ll feel right at home with Reeder 4. It still syncs with all the most-popular news services, and is still one of the best-looking RSS apps around.

This is the Bionic Reader view.
This is the Bionic Reader view.
Screenshot: Cult of Mac

But Reeder 4 brings a couple of brand-new features. One is Bionic Reading, which is a kind of power-user versions of dyslexic typefaces. It formats the article text to make it faster and easier to read. It looks weird to begin with, but is surprisingly effective.

The other new feature is the built-in read-later service. It’s just like Pocket or Instapaper, only it’s built into the new Reeder app. This lets you save articles to read later. It’s neat, but as Reeder already supports Instapaper, you might not care. Also, Reeder’s version lacks folders, and can only save from inside the app — there’s no way to save an article from Safari, for instance, which limits this feature’s utility.

Price: $4.99

Download: Reeder 4 from the App Store (iOS)

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