Planetary: Planetary is an iPad-only music player that renders your collection as a stunning universe of stars (artist), planets (albums), and moons (songs). Each successive level is fluidly interactive: tap on the name of a song to play it, give the display a gentle nudge to set the solar system spinning in motion, and expand with two fingers to zoom out back to album view. It’s hard to explain the experience in words, but it’s just one of those brilliantly designed apps that responds to your every touch just the way you think it should. Free.
Adobe Eazel for Photoshop: Adobe Eazel, Jesus’ favourite iPad Photoshop app, works as a standalone paint application and also connects to Photoshop, sending images that get automagically scaled to whatever resolution you want. What’s especially cool is the five finger interface and the mixing of wet and dry paint for colour blending, with an engine that allows paint to dry over time, just like in real life. $5.99[imgclear]
New Yorker: The first great iPad subscription: $7.99 a month or $75 a year. Which is to say this is all a pretty damn good deal as each issue of writing literature excellence only costs a buck fifty. I’m signing up.[imgclear]
Hitpad: HitPad is an app that explains the hot trending topics you never have any clue what’s about. It uses some special formula to find out what’s trending and then shows pretty columns relevant to that trend: News, Tweets, Videos, Web and Photos. The idea is that those bite sized but informative nuggets of info will let you know why a particular subject is trending. Free.[imgclear]
Adobe color Lava for Photoshop: colour Lava allows you to mix colours in a natural way, like a real paint palette. From the mixes you can create individual colour swatches and also colour themes. This app works connected to Photoshop in real time, but also on its own. $3.99[imgclear]
Adobe Nav for Photoshop: Jesus says, it allows you to control Photoshop files and tools from the iPad. Using Nav you can create a custom palette with 16 of your favourite tools, as well as use it to pick colours or zoom. It will also allow you to navigate up to 200 documents already opened in Photoshop CS5, access their information, allowing you to reorder them to suit your workflow, and even zoom into the documents at will. Think about this last feature as a virtual light box for your current open documents. Nav will also allow you to open any document from your iPad on your desktop Photoshop instantaneously. $2.49[imgclear]
Everyday Looper: A simple app for recording a snatch of audio, looping it ad infinitum, recording another snatch on top of that, looping it ad infinitum, and so on. Just tap one of the four supplied tracks (or one of the six, on the iPad), and start making noise. Tap it again to stop recording and set the end point for the loop. From there you can record more, merge tracks together, set the volume of individual tracks, and so on. $7.99.
On the Way to Woodstock: A detailed look at Woodstock, the artists who performed there, and the social climate in which the concert arrived. The experience is organised around a timeline of of the concert, with photos, videos, songs, and capsule biographies of musicians and groups supplied along the way. It’s all a bit disorganised and overwhelming, but then so was the concert itself. $12.99