This week we read the news (later) with Fiery Feeds, squeeze out music with Korvpressor 2, add photos to our contacts with Vignette, and way more.
Korvpressor 2 is an amazing update to what was already one of the best music production apps on iOS — as we’ll see in a moment. But the real reason I’m writing about it today is the beautiful interface. I mean, look at it. Just look at it. Oh, and it also comes on Mac.
Fiery Feeds is my favorite RSS reader app on iOS. It strikes the perfect balance between power, good looks, and ease of use. For instance, you can customize the entire look of the app with themes, you can set it to share stories to your chosen apps with a single swipe, and the whole thing is navigated with swipes. Version 2.2 just showed up, and it’s a biggie. Apart from some neat UI changes, Fiery Feeds now has iCloud syncing, and its own built-in Instapaper alternative.
This week we sell our skills in videos, slow down any song in Apple Music, make wild music with Factory, and more.
Perfect Tempo lets you speed up or slow down any song in Apple Music, so you can learn how to play it. Unlike every other app that does this, Perfect Tempo works on any song on the Apple Music service, not just purchased and/or downloaded songs. It also has a great, easy-to-use design, which is way better than the utilitarian drop-down lists of many other apps.
Factory is an aptly-named new iPad synthesizer from SugarBytes. In fact, calling it a synth is underselling it — kind of like calling GarageBand a “tape recorder”. Factory does synthesize sounds, but it also has built-in effects, a sequencer, an arpeggiator, and a totally wild DJ-style crossfader, which lets you morph between presets.
The app is ultra-flexible, as capable of finely-crafted sound design as it is of sonic mayhem.
This week we control our HomeKit homes form our wrists, control our iPad music with Audiobus 3.4, get help talking to foreigners with Day Interpreting, and more.
Did you know that you can record the music playing on your iPhone, to your Mac, straight up the USB cable? Just hook your Mac up to your iPhone (or iPad), using the Lighting cable that came in the box, and you can record anything. Additionally, if you’re looking to play music while recording video iPhone, this guide will show you how.
It’s just like taping off the radio when you were a kid — or maybe when your dad was a kid — only better quality.
The Synclavier is a digital synthesizer from the early 1980s. Synclavier Go! is an iPad app that mimics the classic synth. But this post isn’t about those. It’s about the Synclavier Knob, an accessory for the app.
The Synclavier Knob is a single knob on a mounting plate the size of an iPad mini. That’s it. Oh, and it costs $399.
Both macOS and iOS have excellent built-in support for subtitles. And many video player apps will play a subtitle file for you if you just drop it into the same folder as a movie, or even drag and drop it onto a movie that’s already playing.
But if your hearing is fine, why should you bother with subtitles? I came up with a short list:
The good news is that subtitles are easy. And the bad news? There is none.
This week we view Instagram on the Apple Watch, customize Apple Music, and finally remove those terrible auto-playing previews in Netflix.
If you’re an iOS-using musician, then AUM is an utterly essential app. It’s an audio mixer, but that description hides its power. AUM does let you mix the audio from various apps, but it also hosts audio units (like plugins), routes audio between them, records those channels, and more.
This week, AUM got a huge update, adding a whole bunch of great new features.
If you have an old Mac that doesn’t support AirDrop, or you use a PC with your iPhone or iPad, then getting files from one to the other is a real pain. Readdle’s Documents app fixes this, making it easy to beam anything from one place to the other, wirelessly. Today we’re going to see just how easy it is. And one other neat trick is that you can use this on any computer, not just your own.
This week we check out yet more amazing music-mangling apps, check in with web browser savior StopTheMadness, and find out how to buy gift cards from anywhere, at any time.
This week we re-light our Portrait Mode photos with AR in Focos, easily play complex chord progressions with ChordPad X, check out the amazing new Pixelmator Photo, and more.
Atom is a “piano roll” sequencer for making music on iOS. A piano roll is named for the software used to run olde worlde player pianos. It’s a roll of paper with holes punched in it. As the roll moves through the piano, the holes are read by a “tracker bar,” and the corresponding notes are played.
Imagine such a sheet of paper in the digital realm. That’s a modern piano-roll sequencer, and it’s a commonplace way to control software instruments. Atom brings some amazing tricks to the piano roll. It’s also an Audio Unit (AU) app, which means it can work as a plug-in inside your favorite iOS Music apps, like Cubasis and GarageBand.
Pixelmator Photo, a new image-editing app for iPad, gives you tons of tools for tweaking your images. The app lets you apply filters, crop, trim and generally making your photos look great.
In this regard, Pixelmator Photo is like a zillion other photo apps for iOS. What sets it apart are a) the now-expected Pixelmator polish, and b) machine learning that powers pretty much everything.
I’ve taken the app, which launches today, for a quick spin, and it’s pretty great. The photo-editing space is so crowded with great apps, though, that we’re spoiled for choice. How does Pixelmator Photo match up?
This week we edit photos with AI using Pixelmator Photo, secure our internet with Cloudflare Warp, and enjoy an AI-picked list of our favorite new podcast episodes with Castro Top Picks. And that’s just the beginning.
A new music app release from Klevgrand is always something to get excited about. And a new guitar amp simulation app? Almost as rare as an in-the-wild sighting of an AirPower mat. Combine both, at an introductory price of just $10, and you have a pretty special day. The app is called Stark, and it’s also the first Audio Unit amp sim for iOS.
This post could more correctly be titled “How to get Apple News outside Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.” Those are still the only places that Apple News is available, almost four years after the service’s launch in September 2015.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get the app even if you don’t live in one of those countries. Here’s how.
This week we celebrate that Drafts is finally available for Mac, share and edit photos with Darkroom, watch some movies with Infuse 6, and lots more.
Darkroom, my favorite iOS photo-editing app, just became even more useful. The latest 4.1 update adds a Photos editing extension, a new share extension, drag and drop, and Files app support.
This week we clean up text with Text Case, fix up focus with Focos, ditch Instagram with Sunlit, and more.
The latest version of GoodReader enables iPad users to view two documents side-by-side. It also offers a long list of improvements to its built-in PDF viewer and methods for securing files.
This iOS app debuted back in 2009, not long after the original iPad, and has been called a Swiss army knife of file managers.
Making your iPad Pro more useful is the theme of a series of short videos released today by Apple. Each takes a common task and briefly shows how it can be tackled with a iOS tablet and Apple Pencil.
There’re suggestions on creating presentations and podcasts, going paperless, and more. Watch all five videos now.