Pure Acid is a bass synthesizer and drum machine app for the iPad, and it might just be the best drum machine app ever. It is, for me, the first app that actually feels like you’re using physical drum machine hardware instead of just another touchscreen app. Part of this is down to the one-screen interface, where everything is (mostly) always in the same spot — just like real buttons. And part is due to the app design genius of Pure Acid’s creator, Dmitrij Pavlov (aka Jim Pavloff).

This week we get healthy with Apple’s Research app, build ridiculously-powerful shortcuts with Toolbox Pro, listen to internet radio with Triode, and scare ourselves silly with Layers of Fear. Shiver.

Apple’s Shortcuts app is already a very powerful tool for automating stuff on your iPhone and iPad, and for creating your own push-button mini-apps. But what if it also could use the deep tools that Apple builds into iOS for app developers? What if Shortcuts could use Face ID, or analyze your photos using iOS’ crazy-powerful machine learning? Or if you could use the OCR to pull text out of photos, all inside Shortcuts?

Thats what Toolbox Pro does. It opens up many of Apple’s amazing under-the-hood technologies, and lets you use them just by dragging a new step into your Shortcuts workflows. Let’s see what it can do.

This week we get editing with Photoshop for iPad, transfer huge files with Dropbox, get private with DuckDuckGo for Safari, and dictate a letter, offline, in privacy.

iPhone and iPad can now take advantage of Dropbox Transfer, which allows users to more easily send and receive up to 100 GB of files.

It doesn’t have the size restrictions of email, and is simpler than Dropbox’s traditional system for sharing files.

This week we stream movies off USB sticks, stay safe with social networks, learn to play guitar with Apple Music, and draw pictures on virtual paper. These are the best apps and updates of the past seven days.

4Pockets’ MultiTrack Recorder Plugin is an audio-recording app that can be loaded inside other music apps. If you’ve ever seen an app like GarageBand or Logic in action, you’ll be familiar with the layout of multiple tracks on a horizontal timeline. MultiTrack Recorder Plugin offers exactly that, only it’s designed to be used inside other music apps. Apps that don’t have their own recording functions.

This week we check the weather, take a nap, edit photos on our Macs using Apple Pencil, and enjoy Catalina’s Catalyst apps.

This week we find new friends to hang out with, shoot video with both iPhone cameras at once, fall for yet another Facebook data-gathering app and more.

Safari’s content blockers effectively block trackers and other Bad Stuff on the web, but that only works in Apple’s browser. Any other app you install on your iPhone or iPad can send all kinds of personal information to anyone, without you ever knowing. Your location, the details of your menstrual cycle, how long you spend asleep — pretty much anything.

So how do you stop this? Well, iOS 13 itself can help limit some abuses. But what you really need is an iOS firewall app that can detect and shut down any unauthorized connections.