The Week in iOS Apps: 1970s sounds in a 21st century app

This week’s roundup includes an app that reproduces the sounds of a famous 1970s synthesizer. Read on!

Arp Oddyssei ($20, iPhone and iPad) is an app built for a particular kind of music nerd. Love the sound of the 1972 ARP Odyssey analog synthesizer? (Here’s a demo on YouTube.) This app is a “complete recreation” of that machine and the groovy future sounds it made—plus a few new effects have been added, thanks to the miracle of 21st century technology.

Adobe Photoshop (freemium, iPhone and iPad) launched in Version 5.0 this week, unveiling a new feature that lets users easily create “high-quality” photo collages. Also new: Integration with Google Photos—users can select pics from their Google account to edit in the app.

Bear (freemium, iPhone and iPad) “ is a beautiful, flexible writing app for crafting notes and prose.” You can create quick notes, code snippets, or in-depth essays. The app also includes a focus mode to help you concentrate, as well as advanced Markdown and other markup options that are an online writer’s best friend. You can even stay on task by adding to-dos to individual notes. It’s also available for the Mac.

The research giant has let loose with a couple of big app updates in recent days. Gmail (free, iPhone and iPad) has a new look and one killer new feature: “Undo send”—the ability to call back that too-hastily sent message. Calendar (free, iPhone and iPad) has added a month view, as well as a week view in landscape mode, along with other updates.

IFTTT (free, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch) has been revamped, replacing its old “recipes” with new “Applets” from  Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon Alexa, Nest, Fitbit, BMW, Slack, Twitter, and hundreds of other services. Say the makers: “Applets can do everything that Recipes could—and much more. They bring your services together, creating new experiences that you can unlock with a single switch.”

If The Trail (freemium, iPhone and iPad) reminds you a bit of the old “Oregon Trail” game, but with better graphics,you’re not alone. The aim of this game? “Set forth to reach the town of Eden Falls – explore, craft, collect, trade, discover, and eventually settle and build.” The good news? You’re unlikely to die of dysentery.

This is the perfect app for the gig economy. Workfrom (free, iPhone) lets you discover great places to sit down with your laptop and get some work done—in more than 1,200 cities around the world—assuming, of course, you’re not working from home or in an office.

PayPal now lets you use Siri to send money to others … Viber (pictured) now lets you chat with brands and businesses … WhatsApp Messenger has added GIF support.