This week we punch through muted, silenced phones with magic alerts, replace $1,300 hardware sequencers with a $20 iOS app, and enjoy Endlesss music jams with anyone, anywhere in the world.
Darkroom – Photo Editor
Photo: Darkroom
Darkroom, one of the two1 best third-party photo library/editing apps on iOS, also has one of the most responsive developers. It’s rare to see a new iOS feature that isn’t fully exploited by Darkroom in double-quick time. This week it’s iPad newfound cursor support. If you have a trackpad or mouse connected to your iPad, and you’re running iOS 13.4, then Darkroom will now let you edit and navigate with them. You even get the cool blobby morphing cursor that makes it all so easy to use.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Download: Darkroom – Photo Editor from the App Store (iOS)
NeedUNow: Urgent Alerts App
Photo: NeedUNow
Sponsored: NeedUNow is the ultimate emergency contact app. The idea is to let you get in touch with someone even when their phone is on mute or set to Do Not Disturb. It works on iPhone and Android, and once installed, you can punch an alert through to any of your emergency contacts who are also using the app. In this way, it’s similar to iOS’s built-in Emergency Bypass feature, only a lot easier to set up. How does it work? The FAQ doesn’t say. It just seems like magic.
Price: Free
Download: NeedUNow: Urgent Alerts App from the App Store (iOS)
Drambo
Photo: Beepstreet
This sequencer app is a game-changer. Drambo for iPhone and iPad is nothing less than a full-featured hardware groovebox, like Elektron’s Octatrack, and a modular synthesizer, both squeezed into a $20 iPad app. Music-wise, there’s almost nothing this app can’t do. And yet it remains absurdly easy and fun to use. A triumph.
Price: $19.99
Download: Drambo from the App Store (iOS)
Endlesss – Multiplayer Music
Photo: Endless
After a seemingly endless beta, jamming app Endlesss finally arrived for quarantined musicians everywhere. The app lets you connect with other musicians and jam with them in real time. It’s loop-based, and users can contribute to each others’ tracks. When you’re done, you can take what’s been created, and further mix/edit the results. It’s hard to think of a better time to release an app like this.
Price: Free
Download: Endlesss – Multiplayer Music from the App Store (iOS)
- The other one is Pixelmator Photo. ↩
