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The iPad is a perfect device for piano training. It is compact, easy to mount near or at the piano, and contains countless apps for practicing and training with scales or chords. So does Piano Scales & Jam Free provide enough features and an intuitive enough design to be useful for someone learning the piano, or is it yet another simple scale trainer like so many others in the App Store? It falls somewhere in between.

Piano Scales & Jam Free is simple at first glance. When you open the app you can choose to either practice scales as outlined … Read more

Schedulers and planners are supposed to make life simpler by helping you be on time and on task. i-Schedule Free offers a slightly different take on a scheduler in that it's focused on school schedules. The problem, however, is that its user interface isn't well integrated, so it requires lots of input, making it more trouble than it's worth.

i-Schedule Free opens with a dragon design while you wait for the actual app features to load. From there, you're presented with nine different menu options that all require you to input some kind of information. Going … Read more

Tracking the various aspects of a system, including memory, hard drive, and CPU usage, from one place can be difficult. Magician for Mac provides a well-designed solution to monitor almost every computer process.

Available as freeware with an option for donations, Magician for Mac does not require any payment for full functioning. Since the program was rather small and had a native installer, download and setup was easy and completed quickly. After starting the program for the first time, the user is prompted to set up an online account, although this is not necessary for full functioning. The program has … Read more

A number of programs exist to allow users to convert files between the different audio formats available. For those users who want the capability to change files between most audio formats, iSonics for Mac is a good option that performs well.

This program comes as a trial version. While there are no listed restrictions, the developer indicates a payment of $8 is needed for the full version. iSonics for Mac does have technical support and it installs quickly and easily. The interface is thoughtfully designed and should not be difficult to interpret for average users of audio files. Conversion options … Read more

The iPhone and iPad are both intuitive devices that offer a range of options for people of all walks of life, including those with impairments of sight. One such app is Tap Tap See, which uses the built-in accessibility functions of iOS 6 to activate a remote network that can rapidly identify and announce objects using the device's built-in camera. Native for the iPhone (but perfectly functional upscaled to an iPad), Tap Tap See is a marvelous app that does one very basic thing very well.

Before you use Tap Tap See, you'll need to turn on the … Read more

Rainbow Drive solves multiple problems in one fell swoop. For many people, cloud storage is a reality -- especially on the iPad, which has limited internal storage. You need somewhere to store photos, music, videos, and work files. However, it can be hard at times to find those files, especially when you can't remember if they are in Google Drive, Dropbox, or another cloud storage altogether. Rainbow Drive is designed to fix that problem.

The idea is simple. Download RainbowDrive and log in to your Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive accounts so you can find all of your files … Read more

Our favorites games tend to be the simple, mindless ones because we typically play them while trying to kill time. Icy Tower 2 certainly falls under that category. Its simple gameplay will keep you entertained for hours.

We did notice that Icy Tower 2 took about 30 seconds to load. An instructional intro walks you through the game's controls. For example, tilting the phone to the left and right moves the character; tilting it a bit more makes him jump higher. The object of the game is to jump higher and higher on platforms to reach the top of … Read more

Do you have any photos or videos on your smartphone you'd like to hide from the general public? Pandora offers to put them into a password-protected box so no one can see them but you. It works exactly as advertised, but it's nowhere near as dynamic as other lockbox apps.

Though it has a name like the music-streaming app and a logo like Dropbox, it's confusingly neither. That means it can cleverly hide in your app menu without raising the eyebrow of someone looking through your phone. When you first use the app, it drops you right … Read more

Most high-end cameras have a burst-shooting option -- that is, they can take a series of pictures at a high rate of speed. This feature is not often seen in smartphones, but many people would love it to be. Fast Burst Camera Lite brings this great feature to Android devices. While the application works for the most part, it does have some serious disadvantages.

Fast Burst Camera Lite loads quickly and the installation is not complex at all. Upon opening the application the user is greeted with a pretty rough-looking user interface. The viewfinder takes up the whole screen and … Read more