You have a new iPad, and you have a new Apple Pencil. Time to learn how to draw, right? Not necessarily. Just like a regular pen or pencil, there are ton of other things you can do with an Apple Pencil. You can write, of course, but you can also play games, compose musical scores, do coloring in books, edit photos, and even play the Apple Pencil like a musical instrument.
Let’s take a look at the best non-drawing apps for Apple Pencil.
If you use Spotlight to find stuff on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be familiar with the mess of results you get when you search. Maybe you’re searching for a note or an email about that really important thing, only the actual results you want are buried under a heap of nonsense from twitter, from YouTube, from all the Ebay classifieds you’ve viewed, and so on.
The good news is, you can trim these results, eliminating the noise you don’t need. The even better news is that recent versions of iOS do this is a much more elegant way.
Electric guitar players have effects pedals. It’s an addiction, and a law of nature. We keep buying little stomp boxes in pursuit of the perfect sound, and of course we don’t even call it sound. We call it “tone.” But the sensible players don’t try to beat the addiction. They switch to software. Instead of buying and trading expensive hardware boxes, they move to something like iOS effects apps, which let you experiment at a fraction of the cost.
And that’s where IK Multimedia’s new iRig Stomp I/O Pedalboard comes in. It’s a hardware pedalboard that provides guitar players with a familiar front-end to all those amazing iOS effects.
Record and publish your own microcasts, play as an architect and building manager, and have your illusions about the state of the world set right in this week’s app roundup.
Did you ever fancy making a podcast, but as soon as you considered the logistics, your eyes crossed, and you felt suddenly sleepy? But what if creating and publishing a podcast was as easy as squeezing out a Tweet? That’s where Wavelength comes in. Wavelength is a brand new app that lets you record, edit, and publish your short podcast — or microcast — in record time. It can even add your podcast feed to the Apple Podcast Directory, so anyone can easily find and subscribe to your microcast. Here’s how to podcast on iPhone.
Did you ever snap a photo of a magazine page, or capture a screenshot of text, and wish you could just copy and paste it like any normal text? Maybe it’s a photo of a recipe from a paper book, and you’d like to be able to search for it in future? The good news is that you can easily extract the text from a photo or screenshot, right there on your iPhone.
The even better news is that we’re going to learn how to do it right now.
This is the Roadie. It’s a guitar tuner with a rotating slot that you slide over a tuning peg of your guitar. Then you pluck a string, and the Roadie listens to the pitch, and actually turns the peg for you, shifting the pitch up or down until it is in tune.
Left to its own devices, the Dock on your Mac is little more than a list of running apps, plus a trash can. You probably already know that you can force apps to stick around in the Dock for quick-launching, and that you can drag any folder to the Dock and just click it to see inside. But did you know that you can add special folders that show you your recent documents, applications, your favorite items, and more?
The recent documents folder is worth the price of this tip alone (which is $0 BTW), because it keeps track of all your recently-used documents, anywhere on your Mac, and gathers them into one place. If you’re the kind of person who has a desktop cluttered with pretty much all your documents, then fast access to that file you were using one moment ago — and you swear it was right here, oh God where has it gone — is a lifesaver.
Here’s how to add it.
Ikea’s new Eneby speaker may not pack the smarts of a HomePod or an Amazon Echo, but it’s great-looking and it’s pretty cheap. The new range of Ikea Bluetooth speakers starts at $49. If all you want is a nice, easy speaker for the living room, kitchen, or even the backyard, you should take a look.
Facebook tracks your every move and sells the information to people who try to fix elections. Twitter is destroying the fabric of democracy, and doesn’t care. And even if you leave Facebook, it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, two of the biggest social networks outside of itself and Twitter. And now Facebook is promising to let anyone delete their posts, which means that you’ll never really know what’s been happening. IT’s time to leave Facebook and move on, but where?
After all, a social network is pointless if you have no friends on it. Happily, there’s a social network out there already that’s bigger than Facebook, and completely uncontrolled by any single company. It’s the web.
Today we’re going to see how to post your photos, messages, and other rants onto your own microblog, just like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The best part is, you own everything, anyone can read it, and it’s as easy to use as sending a tweet.
Ever lost a tab in Safari? You have like a million of the things open, and you end up scrubbing a two-finger trackpad swirl over the entire tab bar, shifting those things around so that you can read their labels, and you still can’t track down the Cult of Mac website in there. Well here’s good news: you can just pin that tab to the edge of the tab bar, so you’ll never lose it again.
Todo lists are great for not forgetting to, you know, do stuff. But they can be tyrannical, stressing you out with an endless queue of tasks which need to be completed. Even if you are hyper-productive, and manage to get through most of your chores, your todo list can end up cluttered with lower-priority tasks that don’t need to be on it.
This, then, is where the do-it-later list comes in.
Laney’s new Mini-Laney and Mini-St-Lion are tiny, portable, desktop versions of the U.K. guitar-amp company’s popular full-sized amplifiers. They come in retro and modern styles, and mono or stereo versions. Plus, they can be hooked up to any amp-simulation software on your iPhone using a single cable.
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.
Lock-Screen Notes are one of the iPad’s best features. You can tap your Apple Pencil onto the unlocked iPad and immediately start writing or drawing on a note. It’s almost as instant as having a real pen and paper in front of you. But did you know that you can do the same thing with your iPhone? That right, you can create and add to notes right from the lock screen — no Apple Pencil required.
Are you a musician struggling to come up with song ideas? Are you a non-musician who just wants to come up with a neat melody for that cat video? Then you should check out Fortamento, a melody generation app for iPhone which is both incredibly easy, and surprisingly deep.
MacOS High Sierra upgraded the Mac’s under-the-hood file system, replacing the decades-old HFS+ with the shiny new APFS. What this means for the user is way faster file copying, the ability to revert to previous versions of your documents, and several other neat features. But it also means that you may have a lot less free space left on your storage disk, thanks to APFS’ habit of using it to store special ‘dark matter.’Today we’ll learn what this dark matter is, and how to free up disk space.
Today we’re going to use the new features in Pages 4.0 to create an amazing report. If you need to write a book report, or create a longer document for school or work, the new Master Pages feature in Apple’s free word processor will prove extremely handy.
With Pages, it’s now easier than ever to throw together an amazing-looking document with almost no effort. Apart from the writing, that is.
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.
OCD users of macOS 10.13.4 rejoice! You can now reorder your Safari bookmarks alphabetically. Instead of having to settle for having Safari’s bookmarks always being in the order you created them, or having to manually drag them into the order you want, you can now have Safari sort them for you.
Why would you want to do this? Well, if you’re browsing through a huge folder of bookmarks, then having any kind of sort order is better than none. And if you’re using accessibility options — for instance if you are using screen readers because your sight is impaired — then alphabetical listings are essential.
Roli’s new Songmaker Kit is a kick-ass portable music-making setup that hooks up to your iPad, iPhone or Mac. It consists of a mini version of Roli’s amazing Seaboard keyboards, along with a couple of the company’s modular Blocks. Everything connect via Bluetooth, creating a custom music workstation that’s easy to use and extremely portable.
Let’s take a look at the Roli Songmaker Kit and see how you can use it to make music anywhere.
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 new Apple Pencil-friendly version of Pages for iPad also has a couple of other big new features. One of these is iBook creation, which we’ll look at in another post. Today we’re going to see how to add an Image Gallery to a regular Pages document. This is handy if you need to include lots of pictures into a document, but don’t want to use pages and pages to do so.
You could, for instance, include galleries of vacation photos in a newsletter for family and friends, with images stacked into daily galleries, or organized by event. Or you could pile a bunch of diagrams into one Image Gallery, allowing you to include a lot more information without cluttering the document. Better still, you can export your Pages document as an eBook, and the galleries become fully interactive.
Let’s find out how to add one.
In Pages 4.0 for iPad, you can use Apple Pencil for more than just tapping stuff. Now you can use two great new iOS-only features in Apple’s word processing software. Smart Annotations lets you mark up text just like a teacher would — scoring red lines through words, running a highlighter over a sentence, etc. And a new drawing mode means you can easily add a sketch to a page just by tapping it with the pencil.
The drawing feature is neat, and brings Pages into line with Apple’s Notes app. But Smart Annotations will be a game-changer for many people, because it replicates something many folks still prefer to do on paper. Here’s how to take advantage of the new Pages features.
Moog — pronounced “Moog” — is famous for its awesome-sounding synthesizers. But recently it has has also become famous for making dome of the best iOS music apps. For instance, Moog’s Model 15 is a perfect digital reproduction of its modular synth that sounds as good as the real thing. Which is to say, it sounds incredible. Now Moog has made the Model D, an app version of the original 1970 Minimoog keyboard. And it is just as rad as you might hope,