By Liyo Kikon
ONE of the best uses for the iPad are the creative apps and you can definitely do a lot on it thanks to the large screen size and the app store, which is full of really cool creative apps for artists, musicians, designers, writers, videographers and all kinds of art form. Here are a few apps I highly recommend you to try out on your iPad.
Garage band
This is an obvious one and the most popular. Here’s the golden rule for owning an iPad - if you have an iPad, you need to have this app! Garage band is a very simple application for creating music and is very popular because it can actually create high quality music right from your iPad even if you have very little music skills. The interface is quite simple, you can choose what instrument you want after you open a new project and even if you can’t play the instrument by yourself, you can choose the chords you want and let the application play automatically and mix them together. I especially love the ‘smart drums’ where you set a pace by placing the kick drum, the snare and others by moving them around in a box to determine the speed and intensity of each element. I can go on talking about Garage band all day but if you haven’t tried out this application, you need to get it right now!
Procreate
Drawing on an iPad used to be a kind of hobby for most people and hardly anyone took it seriously, but with the introduction of apple pencil, it is slowly starting to open doors for professionals to actually take the iPad seriously. For me, I don’t have an iPad pro or the pencil but that doesn’t stop me from using this awesome app. Procreate is one of the best drawing apps out there with lots of custom brushes, tons of layers, easy undo and redo buttons and best of all, it handles palm rejection like child’s play! And yes, when I say palm rejection, I’m talking about it while using an ordinary stylus - you know, those pen shaped tools with a rubber tip. I have one of those and while drawing in Procreate, I can rest my hand on the screen comfortably without creating any unwanted lines.
Assembly
Most professionals use Adobe Illustrator or Corel on their desktop when it comes to vector art and thanks to the power of iPad and the app developers, there are now a ton of vector drawing apps out there such as Adobe Illustrator draw, Indeeo Graphic, Inkpad, etc. but most of them simply mimic the power of desktop application. Assembly by Pixite stands out from the crowd by being different. This app works by providing you with some basic shapes which you can manipulate in order to create various graphics. You simply tap on a shape, and using the anchor points you can scale, rotate, change the colors, add drop shadows and flip to create your own designs. The best part is that you can export your designs to various formats including “.svg” so that you can fine tune the design in your desired desktop application. There are tons of additional shapes available as well, but most of them will have to be purchased individually.
Sure, there are lots of applications out there for writing your next book such as Microsoft word, Evernote, iA writer and Google docs but writing on an iPad has never been fun until I came across Hanx. Imagine having an old fashioned typewriter on a high tech touch screen device. I know what you are thinking, that just sounds awful! but try out this free app and you will agree with me that typing is actually fun when you see the typewriter keys, and hear the mechanical sound as you type. Most of the functions such as text alignment, colors and others come in the form of a paid option but the free version is more than enough if your only need is to type. And the best feature about this app is that the pesky auto correct has no power here.
Editing films on an iPad is a bit of a joke, but since it is another form of creative work, I guess the best one out there is iMovie since it is the only app which comes close enough to the power of a desktop editor. If you are on the go, you don’t have your laptop with you and you need to quickly edit your footage, then iMovie is probably the best option out there. You can add titles, transitions, overlays and more using this simple app and managing individual clips is very simple. You can easily add filters to the video as well, and exporting the finished video does not take long either.
