Work, rest and play with these incredible apps for creativity, productivity and watchability
Learn an instrument
1 Fancy being a guitar hero?
Guitar makers Fender and Gibson both offer apps that’ll teach you to play like legends, and both have free trials – 7 days in the case of Fender and 14 for Gibson. They’re both brilliant apps for teaching guitar (and in the case of Fender, ukulele and bass too), but before you hand over your card details make sure you check out GarageBand first.
GarageBand’s Smart Instruments enable you to mess around with guitars, basses, pianos and synths, and if you go over to your Mac you can download free guitar and piano lessons too. If there’s a specific song you’d like to learn, head over to ultimate-guitar.com where you’ll find guitar, ukulele and piano tabs and often video too.
Learn to DJ
2 Fancy spinning the (quite small) wheels of steel?
The excellent dJay (Free, offers IAPs) app turns your iPad into high-tech turntables, and being able to physically control the tracks with the touchscreen makes it feel even more intuitive than on the Mac. dJay makes it easy to mix, add effects and can also auto-DJ for you.
Edit, enhance and create amazing pictures
> pixelmator.com, affinity.serif.
3 The Photos app on your iPad has some great editing features. You can adjust the colours of your images, crop and adjust them and use filters to get some nice retro effects, and so on.
But if you want to get really creative with digital images, Pixelmator or Affinity Photo deserve a place on your iPad. They’re both incredibly cheap – £19.49 for Affinity Photo and £4.49 for Pixelmator – and they’re packed with pro-grade features for retouching, editing, enhancing and drawing all kinds of images. Both have Mac equivalents but these apps are great on iPads, especially if you have an Apple Pencil, and they’re bargains considering what they’re capable of.
Play Xbox games
> xbox.com
4 For all the joys of the App Store and Apple Arcade, some of the best games ever made are only for PC or console. But if you have a Microsoft Game Pass subscription (from £7.99/month) you can use Microsoft’s cloud gaming to play them on iPad. Cloud Gaming works on iPhone too but it’s better on the iPad’s bigger screen.
Have a virtual movie night
5 Want t o watch a movie with family or friends but can’t be together? SharePlay, added to FaceTime in iOS 15.1, enables you to watch Apple TV or listen to music while sharing a FaceTime call. You all enjoy the same content at the same time, and you can use Messages to chat or comment by text.
Make your
