Remembering Douglas Adams, intergalactic hitchhiker and technologist, and Apple’s audio and video creation tools released for iPad.

Happy Towel Day, to all who observe

Thursday is Towel Day and we mark this day by carrying around or wearing a towel.

We do this in honour of Douglas Adams, a proponent of the towel as an essential tool for any traveler.

Adams was the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of novels, which spawned from his BBC radio play. He was also an early adopter and promotor of Apple Macintosh computers and was reportedly the second person in the British Isles to own a Apple Macintosh computer (after Stephen Fry).

The author and journalist was a technologist through and through and was involved in early game development, creating an interactive version of Hitchhiker’s in 1984. He also had a hand in breaking the games Labyrinth, Bureaucracy, and Starship Titanic.

Adams died in 2001 at age 49, but his wit and humour live on.

Apple’s released pro studio tools for audio and video creators using iPads

As Apple continues to iterate on the iPad, releasing more powerful versions with greater memory and storage capacity, the hardware is capable of pretty much anything.

With the release of iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, Apple is making it possible for video and audio creatives to use iPads in every dimension of the creative process.

The apps have been designed for the touch interface that is possible with the iPad

Final Cut Pro is one of the most popular video editing programs available. With the iPad version, which requires an iPad with an M1 chip, you can edit video with the help of a virtual jog wheel, and you can use an Apple Pencil to draw on the footage, too.

The software also turns an iPad into a monitor during shooting, and you can edit on the fly, taking advantage of multiple camera set ups and integrating graphics and effects features on the fly.

Logic Pro is audio editing software that can be used to record and mix things like music and podcasts. The iPad version of Logic Pro runs on iPads with at least the A12 Bionic chip. It can be used to record audio – the iPad Pro is equipped with studio-quality mics – and you can create audio thanks to a deep library of instruments and effects and the multi-touch capability of the iPad.

Logic Pro also has a full mixing board built in, so you can create final versions of projects and export them anywhere you need them to be.

The iPad editions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are available now for $7 monthly or $70 for a year.