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Count The Beats: Learn to read and play sheet music with Etude on your iPhone
From the creators of ShoveBox, Wonder Wrap Software has just launched their new iPhone / iPod touch app Etude. Etude is a beautifully designed app that helps you learn to read and play sheet music on the piano. While the built-in synthesizer plays through a piece of music, Etude will scroll through the sheet music being read (correlating each note heard to each note read). A virtual keyboard will also display each key being pressed at the same moment each note is being read and heard. To make things even easier the playback speed can be altered so you can make sure you're hitting every note of Bach's Air! Etude comes preloaded with a few 'Scores' to get you started, but you can download (from within the app) hundreds of other songs for free from the Etude score store. Etude is certainly a novel way to develop your piano playing skills, and a fantastic application of the features of the iPhone / iPod touch for those who love music. Plus, Wonder Wrap Software is developing a version for the iPad, too. Anyone get those pre-orders in? To celebrate the release of Etude this week Wonder Wrap Software is running a promotion where you can get yourself a free copy of their desktop app SimpleChord. All you need to do is tweet.
The loot from the recent MacHeist
As Kevin pointed out on Wednesday, MacHeist has a new bundle for us at the moment -- but this one is what they consider a "nanoBundle" and it's free. I can't speak for everyone here at TUAW, but when I see the word "free" next to software, I horde it. They've decided to just give away this bundle of apps in what appears to be a move to encourage their users to come back for more. 6 great mac apps for zero dollars. That's my kind of deal. There are only 6 more days to download this bundle, so go grab it after checking out the loot: Shove Box -- An awesome reminder, organization, gotta-get-it-done application that sits in your menu bar. You can then drag things like text, URLs, images... possibly anything to the menu bar app and it'll save it for later. When you get some free time, you can go back through and see what you have. There's an iPhone companion app as well. WriteRoom -- A simple writing application that removes all of the typical distractions from your writing sessions. It makes the text window full screen, completely cutting off the rest of the world from your mind -- if you so choose. It still has simple tools like word count, background/text color adjustments... but definitely keeps you focused. We've covered it quite a bit. Twitterrific -- One of my favorite apps on my iPhone as of late. The desktop version is similarly simple. Set up your Twitter account and tweet away with the easiest solution imaginable. TinyGrab -- Is a screen capture maniac's dream. It allows you to use the standard command-shift-4 and select part of your screen or hit spacebar to capture a specific window. The kicker: it uploads it directly to your own FTP server and puts the URL in your clipboard so you can paste it in Facebook, Twitter, email, IM... whatever your pleasure. Hordes of Orcs -- I'll admit, this is the real reason I'm downloading the bundle. I've heard nothing but great reviews about this game even from our own Mike Schramm. It's one of the most innovative desktop tower defense games I've seen. Everything is in 3D, there are 6 different game variations and let's not forget tower defense. Mariner Write -- This is a word processor with features you need but none of the "bloat" found in other applications *cough* Microsoft *cough.* Of course, it will open and save Word documents, as well as other formats. While I was writing this, the download total went up 5,000 downloads but it'll take 500,000 for all of us to get the full benefit. MacHeist says that Mariner Write is the unlockable application, so I'm hoping to get a serial and really try it out. Head over to Macheist, and download your nanoBundle. For the first time, I'll be using all of the apps in it -- and it's free!
ShoveBox for Mac and iPhone
One thing we don't lack for on the fairer platform is snippet / notes managers. Nonetheless, I always find myself curious about the new applications, perhaps because nothing ever quite gets everything just right. ShoveBox is one of the newer entries in the snippet sweepstakes, and while it has been out on the Mac for a while they've just recently released an companion iPhone app (iTunes link).ShoveBox's main advantage is its very simple interface. The little ShoveBox icon sits in your menubar waiting for you to drop something on it: URL, text, images, etc. Without any fuss the box opens and accepts your newest shove, ready to be accessed at some later time. My impression is that ShoveBox is best not so much for things you want to keep in the long run (though it will do that), but perhaps more as a scratchpad or an updated and more advanced URLwell.The iPhone companion app does exactly what you'd expect, giving you access to your notes, etc. on the go. One particularly nifty function is a bookmarklet that allows you to import a website on both the desktop version (from Safari) or the iPhone version (from mobile Safari). So if you're reading something on the go, but want to make sure you save it for later as well, this looks like a great feature.ShoveBox for Mac is $24.95 and a demo is available; the iPhone version is $3.99 from the iTunes App Store.
