Another week brings us another set of great apps. This week we take a look at the iPhone debut of a great Mac photo app, a solid social update to a music-creation app, the reemergence of one of the best March Madness apps, and apps to help you tie the best knots and make stop motion videos easier than ever before.
iPhoto ($4.99)
Plenty of apps let you make minor modifications to pictures, but with iPhoto finally arriving on the iPhone, you can get some real editing done. You can touch and drag on photos to adjust shades of color, add filters to photos by dragging on certain elements of the picture, and even add effects to turn your pictures into watercolors. Photos can also be made into a photo journal using iPhone and then easily uploaded to Facebook or Flickr. Varying sizes of digital brushes allow you flexibility when photo editing so you can mess with just the portion of the photo you’re looking to alter.
GarageBand ($4.99)
GargeBand received a nice update that should have fans of the music-creation app ready to rock. The latest version lets GarageBand users can get together and have jam sessions where the iPhone will record everything onto individual tracks. Once you’re finished rocking with your friends you can go back and edit the tracks you laid down, making sure they sound exactly the way you want. GarageBand also automatically calibrates the tempo of the recording so if someone is playing a bit too quickly or slowly, you’ll never know. The app also received new Smart Instrument support, making it easier than ever to strum chords on a guitar with minimal finger tapping.
NCAA March Madness Live (Free)
The best NCAA March Madness app is back and packing a few new features for 2012. New to the app are live radio streams of every single tournament game, so you never have to miss a second of the action, as well as live Twitter feeds tracking every game. Those new features join the app’s previous best feature; live video streaming for every single game in the tournament. That trifecta of features make this a hard app to pass up, but note that the video streaming is only available after a one-time $3.99 in-app purchase.
Knot Clips ($0.99)
Whenever someone ties a knot in a movie or real life, I’m always secretly jealous I don’t know the first thing about pro-knot tying. With Knot Clips by my side, that ends now. Knot Clips shows you, with step-by-step animations, how to tie over 30 different kinds of knots that could be used for boating, camping or other activities. The app’s tutorials are simple but extremely clear, and while it might seem silly now, the next time you need to tie something down you’ll be glad you had an app to tell you how to do the job right.
Frames – Time-Lapse and Stop Motion Movies ($2.99)
Stop motion animation is probably going to be difficult no matter how you do it, but the Frames app attempts to make things a little simpler by helping you set manual and automatic shutter speeds on your iPhone to mirror proper stop motion techniques. Users can also go back into pre-existing projects and add in additional frames if they feel like something they shot didn’t turn out quite right. Frames also works fantastically for time-lapse videos.
