The Apple Pencil, now compatible with pretty much all new iPads, is not just good for drawing and writing. Because if its bevvy of sensors — tilt, pressure, acceleration, and orientation — the Apple Pencil is also a pretty good musical instrument. Pen2Bow is a new iPad app which turns the Pencil into a violin bow, letting you use all of these natural gestures to play a virtual violin.
Are you a table drummer? Then here’s a fantastic way to annoy your family and friends this weekend. It’s a iPad and iPhone app called AAS Objeq, which uses the iPad’s microphones to listen to your ceaseless, OCD tappety-tapping, and transforms it into more drumlike sounds. That it, the sound of you whacking the table becomes a bass drum, a chopstick on a water glass can become a hi-hat, and so on. The possibilities for irritating those around you are almost endless.
The Iconfactory’s Linea Sketch drawing app for iPad just got updated to version 2.0, and it’s a winner. Somehow, the developers have managed to keep the app’s signature simplicity and ease of use, while adding in some essential new features.
The Archive is the new best plain text notes app for the Mac, and a perfect alternative to nvAlt. If you love Notational Velocity and its spinoff, nvAlt, but hate using abandonware, then The Archive is for you.
On the Mac, you can quickly open up and edit any text file using TextEdit. And while there are a ton of great text-editing apps on the iPad and iPhone, none of them is quite as simple as the Mac’s built-in app. Until now, anyway: Textor combines the iOS 11 Files app with an ultra-simple text editor, making it possibly the quickest and easiest way to quickly view, edit and even create new text files on an iPhone or iPad.
Apple is moving into magazine distribution by acquiring Texture, a digital subscription service that grants users unlimited access to their favorite titles for a single $9.99 monthly fee.
The service, which could be thought of as Apple Music for magazines, covers 200 top magazines. These can be read either in their complete form or via curated articles.
If you like to pretend you’re in a private detective movie, recording yourself with voice-memos as you go about your everyday business, then your app choice is obvious: Voice Memos from Apple. It’s built into your iPhone, it’s simple, quick to use, and rock solid. But if you’re a musician, and you want to quickly capture ideas, the choice is more complicated. Let’s take a look at the best iOS apps for recording music memos.
One of the iPad’s handiest features is its keyboard-shortcut cheatsheet. Whenever you have a USB or Bluetooth keyboard attached to your iPad, just hold down the Command key and wait for a second. An overlay will pop up showing you all the keyboard shortcuts available for the current app.
Did you ever wish you could do the same with the Mac? After all, you always have a keyboard connected the Mac, so a cheatsheet overlay should be even more useful. Then you need CheatSheet, an app that does exactly that.
The Google iOS app just added an iMessage extension that lets users conduct searches without leaving Apple’s chat app. Google also added a couple other features that should make life easier for Apple fans: a Safari plugin that serves up related content, and iPad drag-and-drop support.
Tracking flights is a bit of a pain. Siri can do it, and if you’re a real plane spotter, you might even trouble yourself to find an app to do it. But for most of us, we track a flight once in a while, whenever someone’s coming to visit. We just want something that is simple to use, and the disappears. That something is TodayFlights, a neat app that adds a flight tracker to the Mac’s Notification Center Today View.
Not looking at your smartphone is the new looking at your smartphone. Or, at least, that’s the idea driving an intriguing app which aims to reward students with discounts on movie tickets and other services if they don’t keep checking their iPhones.
Here’s how it works, and why its creators think it matters.
Mastering is the final stage of making a record. After all the playing, recordings, and mixing is done, you send the stereo track off to the best mixing guru you can afford, and they work their special magic, probably surrounded by all kinds of fancy machines.
And while you probably don’t have the experts’ golden ears, or their golden years of experience, now you can have a crack at mastering right there on your iPad (or even iPhone), with Klevgränd’s new mastering app, Grand Finale.
If you like Instant Markup on iOS, then you’re going to love ShotBox. It’s a free app, available from the Mac App Store, that automatically pops up a panel of markup tools whenever you take a screenshot. It’s almost exactly like the Instant Markup tools built into iOS 11.
On the Mac, you can type any character available in there Unicode standard, just by opening up the Emoji & Symbols viewer (Control-Command-Space) and picking the one you want. The selection on iOS is much more limited. Even finding an ellipsis is such an odyssey I can never remember whether it’s available or not. But UniChar changes that. It’s a Universal iOS app that brings every single Unicode character to your device.
Does your podcast player app have too many options? Do you spend more time curating playlists than actually listening? Is it a struggle to add a new podcast, or just listen to the latest episode of a favorite? Then you may appreciate Sodes, an ultra-simple new podcast app from minimalist app developer Jared Sinclair.
As promised, YouTube’s $35-per-month YouTube TV service has landed on Apple TV.
The premium package, which offers a skinny bundle of 40+ live TV channels, has previously only been available on Apple TV if users ran it via AirPlay from an iPhone or iPad. Today marks the first time there has been a native Apple TV app.
iOS is getting to be a serious platform for musicians. Lots of musicians already know that, but now some amazing hardware is appearing that takes advantage of the little devices. The latest is Positive Grid’s Bias Mini, for guitar and bass, 300-watt guitar amplifier that takes its sounds from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac app.
Users of chatroom (and time-wasting tool) Slack will be familiar with typing out emoji reactions. To insert a smiley face, for example, you just type :smile:, and your text will be replaced by a smiley-face emoji when you hit enter.
If you ever find yourself missing this handy feature anywhere else on your Mac, you should take Rocket for a spin. It’s a macOS app that exists to make emojis easier.
2017 was a great year to be an app developer, based on new data that show smartphone users spent more money than ever on apps last year.
According to a new report from Sensor Tower, customers spent $58.6 billion on apps and games in 2017 on the App Store and Google Play. And iOS developers took away the most cash.
With all the fuss about depleted old batteries slowing down iPhones, it might be a good idea to at least check the health of your iPhone’s battery. To do this, you can use a free tool called coconutBattery. This handy app digs into your iOS and Mac devices to tell you how old they are, and how strong your battery is compared to when it was new.
First responder apps may help save your life, but they’re in drastic need of a security overhaul, a new report the Department of Homeland Security says.
Released this week, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate “Securing Mobile Applications for First Responders” report said that discovered glaring security flaws on almost every app that it examined.
A unique selfie app, created by Google, that summons up your inner supermodel is just of one of the picks for this week’s “Awesome Apps” roundup.
In addition, we’ve got part one of an excellent episodic adventure finally available on iOS, a sound-matching app for any guitar players out there, and an augmented reality-focused update to Facebook Messenger. Check out our picks below.
With Christmas coming, it’s probably not the time of year to be spending a whole lot of money on yourself — knowing that there’s plenty of other things you may need to splash your cash on.
Which is why it’s great news that Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy, one of my previously recommended best games of the year, has slashed its $15.99 price tag for the holidays.
It’s not just Apple that’s excited about the possibilities of augmented reality! In its latest Snapchat-inspired update, Facebook has added new AR features to its Messenger app.
Called “World Effects,” the feature lets you place emoji-style 3D objects in three-dimensional space via your iPhone’s rear camera. Objects added include a heart, an arrow, and a robot — along with word bubbles with messages like “love,” “heart,” “miss you,” and — making us feel old — ““bae.”
Apple has released its yearly “Best of” list, highlighting its picks for the top apps, games, albums, movies, podcasts, books, and TV shows — just in time for your holiday purchasing!
As is always the case, the lists combine Apple’s own hand-curated picks and popularity-driven charts, based on purchases in Apple’s various services such as iTunes, the App Store, iBooks Store, and Apple Music.