This week we create groovy beats, take photos in the dark, relax with chilled ambient sounds, and more. It sounds like a rad party!
Prizmo 5 › Pro Scanning + OCR
Photo: Prizmo
Prizmo has long been the prettiest scanning app on iOS, and now it is one of the easiest to use. Just open the app, and it auto-detects any documents in the camera frame. Tap to snap, and it saves the scan, cropping it into a neat scan, and performs OCR (text recognition) on the result.
Price: Free
Download: Prizmo 5 › Pro Scanning + OCR from the App Store (iOS)
Dark Noise
Photo: Dark Noise
Dark Noise is the app for people who hate silence. And also for those who hate noise. The app generates white noise, or soundscapes based on natural sounds like running water, rain, and so on. This covers up distracting noises, or hides the equally-distracting silence.
Price: $3.99
Download: Dark Noise from the App Store (iOS)
Focos
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Version 2 of my favorite focus-wrangling app, Focos, brings one incredible new feature: It can turn any photo, form any iPhone, iPad, or camera, into a Portrait Photo. It does this using machine learning to figure out what is where in the photo, and then lets you add a natural-looking background blur to your image. And of course it still has all its other amazing depth-editing fearers.
Price: Free
Download: Focos from the App Store (iOS)
Groovebox
Photo: Ampify
Groovebox is a super-fun, and super-creative beat and groove-making app for iPhone and iPad. You add instruments, and the app will generate patterns for you. You can mix and match these grooves, and tweak the sounds. I love to use it to generate ideas, and then add to them with guitar etc.
Up until now, though, you’ve been stuck with the built-in presets. In this version, you can save your own user presets, which is a pretty huge deal for musicians. Groovy.
Price: Free
Download: Groovebox from the App Store (iOS)
NeuralCam Night Photo
Photo: Neural Cam
NeuralCam is fully buzzword 3.0-compliant. It uses AI, and computational photography to process the input from the iPhone’s camera, and make photos that look like they were taken by day, not by night. Well, that’s an exaggeration. It doesn’t add back the Sun. But it does a rather remarkable job of pulling detail out of the dark.
Price: $2.99
Download: NeuralCam Night Photo from the App Store (iOS)
