This week we make sweet, sweet music with Group the Loop, relax with the meditative Cycle, and post pictures of everything with the new version of Icro.
Did you know that Adobe’s Lightroom CC for iPhone has a fantastic camera built in? Or that you can now listen to any audio file in the Castro podcast app, just by dropping it into an iCloud folder? Or that you can make a catchy song in your iPad’s web browser using Hookpad 2? Well, now you do.
These are the awesome apps making waves this week.
If you want to shoot great RAW photos on your iPhone, you should use Adobe Lightroom. That’s right. According to tests, Adobe’s excellent photo editing app also has an amazing camera built-in. And best of all, it’s free, provided you don’t mind signing up for an Adobe ID.
As if Amazon customers needed yet more to make their Prime subscription worth it, select Prime users can now take advantage of a new curbside grocery pickup feature at their local Whole Foods.
The feature allows users of the Prime Now app to shop online for fresh produce and then, on orders over $35, elect to pick up the packed groceries in store. They can do this within one hour of placing their order — or, for a charge of just $4.99, within 30 minutes.
Spect is in the one-thing-well school, apps that focus on a single task and make that task as easy and fast as possible. And because Spect comes from Panic developer Steven Frank, it does its task very well indeed.
So what is Spect? It’s a Mac image browser app that lets you dump folders containing thousands of images onto it, and then speed through them, viewing, culling, selecting and deleting along the way.
Your iPhone is capable of shooting incredible videos. Its camera can capture 4K video, which is good enough for the cinema, and the video camera’s auto-stabilization turns your wobbly pans into cinematic sweeps.
And yet it’s still all too easy to shoot a terrible iPhone video. So today we’ll look at some simple tips, and a few gadgets, that will turn your clips into movie masterpieces.
This week we get all private, with a new version of Dashlane, the official password manager of Cult of Mac, plus the Shhlack privacy tool for encrypting your Slack chats to keep them safe from your boss. And once that party is started, we start in with some music apps.
This week we check out a virtual bassist for your iPad, a music player for iOS that actually lets you load tunes off the internet or from the Files app, and two more hot, hot apps, or app-like services.
Oh man, what a week! Today we check out the creative powerhouse that is Affinity Designer, and make some simple case changes with Text Case. How about a brand-new update to the Moment photo app? Not enough? Then perhaps you’ll be satisfied with… Parametric Equalizer!
Tricky text situations:
http%3A%2F%2FIt’s easy to just do this by hand, if time consuming, but now there’s a better way, on iOS at least. Check out Chris Hannahs’s Text Case.
This week we map our minds with WriteMapper, check out the weather with new maps in Carrot Weather, and see who was sampled in that song playing on the radio in WhoSampled. And — if you can believe it — even more.
Apple said Siri would be smarter with iOS 12. The digital assistant will also multitask with the help of a native app.
A single command will kick Siri into high gear through an app called Siri Shortcuts, now available in a beta version to developers through the TestFlight platform.
You may remember Oilist, a iOS app that takes your photos and turns them into paintings. This isn’t your usual lame-o filters app, either. Oilist actually makes images that really do look like they’ve been painted — with brushwork, paint texture, and more.
And now, the developer is working on version 2.0 of this great app, and he wants you to help.
WhoSampled is an iOS (and Android) app that tells you whose samples were used in the music you’re currently listening to. Just like Shazam, you hold it up to a playing tune, and WhoSampled identifies the track. But then it also gives you a breakdown of all the other songs that were sampled to make that track, and can even list cover versions.
Do you hate adding new events to your iOS calendar? It’s a real pain, right? You have to click, and type, and turn one of these time and date dials, and type some more. On the Mac you can just hit ⌘-N to create a new event, and then type something like Dinner tomorrow at 19:00, and the Calendar app just works out what you mean, and adds the event.
On iOS, you have to do it manually, or try to coax Siri into doing it for you — neither of which is a pleasant experience. Why isn’t there a natural-language input for the iOS Calendar app? Well, if you’re using the awesome Drafts app, then there is.
This week we go to school with Apple’s Schoolwork app, then take time out cooking up delicious recipes for pixelated Pokémons. Then we enjoy a beautiful soundtrack on maybe the most impressive synth on iOS — and all for free!
Synth One just launched. It’s a new synth app for the iPad, but it’s also a big deal. Why? Because it is free, open-source, and built by volunteer musicians and programmers. Stay with me here. Synth One isn’t out typical hideous open-source bloatfest of an app. It’s beautifully designed, sounds great, is easy to use, and is above all fun.
Edit is just about the simplest notes app possible. It doesn’t have search, it doesn’t even have multiple notes. It’s just a single page onto which you can write or paste text, and almost nothing more.
This week we take a look at automatic calendar scheduling in WhenWorks, free music lessons in GarageBand for Mac, an annoying new video app from Instagram, and more.
You know when somebody wants to meet up with you, and you end up spending so much time going back and forth trying to agree a time and date that you end up hating that person, and cancel the meeting? Maybe you just lost a multi-million dollar contract for your company, and it’s all the fault of scheduling annoyances1.
WhenWorks fixes that by letting folks book time with you online, using a form that is connected to the calendar on your iPhone.
This week we write a screen-play using text messages, make music out of random internet radio streams, and enjoy Apple’s own Voice Memos app, on the iPad at last.
This week we go cosmic, staring into the universal abyss of time, while simultaneously probing the depths of our iDevices using a new terminal app. All while enjoying a sneak peek of tab favicons in the Safari Technology Preview. It’s all pretty exciting!
This week we get productive, with colorful new features in the Ulysses word processor app, amazing new keyboard controls in Things for iOS, and more. Check out our awesome apps of the week.
Cultured Code’s lovely to-do app Things just got a massive update on iOS, and set the standard for iPad keyboard support at the same time. Now you can control pretty much anything from the keyboard, in a way that’s intuitive and useful, and not just there for power-nerds.
Also — finally — this update lets you drag tasks onto the Things sidebar to add them to your lists.
This week we take lots of photos with the new manual camera app Obscura 2, then we delete them again with the duplicate and junk-finding app, Gemini Photo. And while we’re waiting for those duplicate photos to get scanned, we waste a bit of our lives playing Pocket Run Pool.
