An app for a hobby

Photography

VSCO Cam 3.0

The tools provide precision, including fine-tuning, exposure, temperature, contrast, fade and vignette. Once you have tinkered with the image, the app shows you the original and the final.

For quickies, it also has preset packs. Once done, you can share it easily on multiple social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In February, the VSCO Cam app released a new version, fully integrating itself to the VSCO Grid, a free photo publishing platform that has become the ‘it’ place for photographers.

VSCO Cam 3.0, free on Google play and iTunes; in-app purchases, or additional features, ₹ 55 onwards.

645 Pro Mk II

The app also comes with wow features like Film Modes, inspired by classic film stock from the 1960s, which can be edited, personalized and saved unprocessed to process later on your desktop.

645 Pro Mk II, ₹ 220 on iTunes.

ART

Procreate 2

Meant for digital artists, the app allows you to work at the industry-shared high standard of 4K definition images and lets you export your work into Adobe Photoshop or back up in Procreate files.

“The acrylic brush options are really useful to make sketches and even paintings,” says Harshvardhan Kadam, a graffiti artist based in Mumbai. “I use a Bamboo extension stylus to design characters for production artists. The app is also useful to immediately show to my clients what I have in mind.” But Kadam always creates the end product on paper.

Procreate 2, $5.99 (around ₹ 350) for iPad 2.

The physical notebook form of Moleskine has been quite popular with writers and artists of every era. Now you can choose the digital form to dribble in as well. “I do everything in my Moleskine,” says Bangalore-based Archana Prasad, founder of the creative space Jaaga. The app comes in the classic Moleskine design with digital capabilities. A virtual inner pocket to store favourite images, text that has access to a built-in camera, paper selection from the classic Moleskine: plain, ruled or squared. There’s also an artist toolset of paintbrush, pencil, pen and highlighter. Then there’s a swatch library and font formats to play with. All the images you create can be shared via social networks and synced to Evernote and Dropbox.

Moleskine Journal, free on Windows Phone, Samsung Apps, iTunes; in-app journal styles, $4.99 onwards.

Writing

Writers are messy and ideas come in bits and pieces, not as a linear novel. To capture them all, download Evernote, the popular, note-taking app that syncs all your notes on all devices, including Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, iPhone, Mac and Windows desktop. Note types can include text, image and audio. You can annotate, highlight or update easily. “Evernote has really revolutionized my note-taking patterns,” says author Samit Basu. “It syncs quickly and beautifully between devices so all that tedious mailing of notes to yourself is a thing of the past.” The new version of app that released in March comes with a handwriting function as well as the ability to annotate images.

Evernote, free on Google play, iTunes, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Mac and Windows.

Hemingway

Hemingway, free on Hemingwayapp.com.

“A digital dictionary is essential for writers,” says author Zac O’Yeah, who is also a ‘Mint Lounge’ columnist. “It contains everything one needs to know, and so no more carrying around big fat heavy dictionaries.” Launched in February, Writing Aid is a dictionary which instantly searches for definitions and synonyms when a word is typed into its box. The simple elegant interface not only helps you find meanings but also words when you are struggling for one. So if you type “green blue colour” it will come up with suggestions like turquoise, cerulean, indigo, olive, aqua and teal.

Writing Aid, $0.99 on iTunes.

Music

Floshare

It works for all kinds of music—singing, rapping, even spoken verse. The creators aim to encourage young artistes across genres to be heard and to interact with others. The app has been successfully funded on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and will launch within a month.

Floshare, to be released for Google play and iTunes; price yet to be announced.

Interested in music but never got around to formally learning your bits? See ‘Hoot’, a game that helps amateur musicians learn the basics of Western music theory. The animated game makes learning sheet music a fun game. You start with a tutorial about note lengths and pitch heights, and then go into the game. You hear a song and try and replicate it, moving notes up and down on a sheet of music. If you are too much of an amateur, use the cheat sheet by asking the game teacher for some advice.

Hoot, free on Windows Phone.

Songwriting ideas come by chance, suddenly and scattered. Instead of using a generic note-taking app, head to Hum, which lets you jot down things as well as record audio—all in a single app. You can tag and sort any lyrics by key, tuning or mood and have separate notes for each song. Share them through email or text message and play them within the app.

Hum, £1.49 (around ₹ 150) on iTunes.