10 Mobile Apps That Will Make Your Commute Fly By

Written by Diane Pham / Inhabitat

Adobe Idea Vector App
Designed for savvy creatives who love spending hours tooling away with Adobe CS software, Adobe Ideas is an amazing app that let’s you design on-the-go using vectors, layers, and color themes. Use a stylus or your finger to draw strokes that appear smooth at any zoom level. But what really makes this app so cool is that you can take all your new drawings and import them into Photoshop or Illustrator for further refinement. Now there’s no reason to ever stop creating!

Available for Apple products

Procreate: Turn your iPad into a Canvas
Turn your iPad into a canvas for your next painting with Procreate! Strokes are rendered at a speed and precision that will have you channelling Rembrandt before you even know it. You’ll see your stroke blend, decay, and even smudge in realtime. Each brush has over 25 settings that can be adjusted to achieve the effects you desire — this includes stroke plot, shape, grain, paint dynamics, min/max limits and source images. Anything you create can be exported (layers intact) into Adobe Photoshop.

Available for the Apple iPad

TED Talks
Get inspired to change the world by watching a couple TED Talks before you head into the office. TED’s official app presents over 1,200 talks from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus, and music legends. The entire library is at your disposal, and it works when you’re connected or disconnected from the web. And if your commute ends before you’ve gotten a good fix, you can bookmark or download talks to enjoy later.

Available for Apple products and Android

GarageBand
GarageBand has gone app-happy with a cool new tool that lets professional, aspiring and closet musicians rock out before they start their daily grind. GarageBand turns any iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch into a collection of instruments that can be played, recorded, and then tinkered with in a full-featured recording studio. The app lets you play instruments ranging from pianos, to organs, guitars, drums, and basses – and they even sound and function like their counterparts. Bands also get an extra boost with this app – you can gather your friends to play and record like a real band with Jam Session. Just use the built-in microphone or a guitar to record the pieces of your performance.

Available for Apple products

TNR-i by Yamaha
The TNR-i app is basically the iOS version of the company’s Tenori-on, a funky electronic instrument that you’ve seen musicians like Little Boots or Björk using on stage. The app works with a grid of 16 by 16 LED switches that you tap to activate different sounds. While it’s deceptively simple in appearance, the innovative trance-like sounds it’s capable of creating are only limited by your imagination.

Available for Apple products

What’s your go to app for your commute? Let us know in the comments below.

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Inhabitat is an online magazine devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and design towards a smarter and more sustainable future. Written by a young tech-savvy team designers and design journalists, Inhabitat delivers fresh content daily, showcasing emerging work from the cutting-edge of the global design community. Diane Pham, Architecture and Design Editor of Inhabitat, is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Like so many people out there she too thought she wanted to be an architect when she grew up. After graduating from USC’s Marshall School, she enjoyed a brief stint at SCI-Arc, then working for the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, Perkins Eastman Architects and Resoultion4: Architecture handling their marketing, PR and graphic work. A native Angeleno, she’s also lived in Milan and Paris, and still has her sights set beyond the borders of the US. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, learning languages, cooking, taking photographs and doing as many new things as she can, every moment she can.

Diane Pham

Diane Pham, Architecture and Design Editor of Inhabitat, is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Like so many people out there she too thought she wanted to be an architect when she grew up. After graduating from USC’s Marshall School, she enjoyed a brief stint at SCI-Arc, then working for the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, Perkins Eastman Architects and Resoultion4: Architecture handling their marketing, PR and graphic work. A native Angeleno, she’s also lived in Milan and Paris, and still has her sights set beyond the borders of the US. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, learning languages, cooking, taking photographs and doing as many new things as she can, every moment she can.

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http://profile.typepad.com/myclossette MyClossette

Braingle looks like a lot of fun, even as a coffee table iPad app that you can use as an icebreaker at parties.
http://profile.typepad.com/hello27 Hello

The Adobe Vector app looks awesome!
http://profile.typepad.com/charleycameron Charley Cameron

The NY Times Crossword app has been a total lifesaver for me sooo many times! Will have to check out some of the others
http://profile.typepad.com/dpastaface Dpastaface

the adobe vector app is amazing. i can’t wait to get it on my ipad.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406372133 Yessica
  
  me!!!!!!!! Cant wait!!!!! Only two more days man!!!!!Im thinking about getitng the super monkey ball game because when I was a little younger i used to LOVE that game and I had it for the gamecube so i guess it would be pretty cool to bring back the old memories and be able to play it on my touch.As for what games I would like to see, definitely some racing games for sure. games similar to need for speed would be cool!In the future I would like to see more apps that don’t require wi-fi (if its possible) lol. like Google maps without the need of wi-fi for it to work.
http://profile.typepad.com/d99924888863086349 Emery

Nice! These all sound like perfect apps for me to try out tomorrow on my commute to work at Dish! I travel about 45 minutes each day on the bus and light rail to get to work, so I can use all the entertainment I can get! I would have to say though that my number one go to app for my commute is Dish Remote Access. It works with the Sling Adapter I have at home, and allows me to view all of my favorite shows on my device, live or recorded, anywhere I go. It’s definitely the one that really makes the trip zoom on by!
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406344830 Lutvi
  
  Personally, I think that the touch and the color are apples and orgenas. The touch is a nicely focused device: very lightweight, trim form factor, with e-ink; i.e. easy on the eyes with a long battery life, but restricted to grayscale. Also, at $140, it’s pretty inexpensive. The color can either be considered a low-end tablet or an expensive and snazzy e-reader with a crappy battery life. If I was tempted to upgrade to a color, I’d just spring for an ipad or an android tablet.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406368902 Syahira
  
  Greetings! This is my 1st comment here so I just watned to give a quick shout out and tell you I genuinely enjoy reading through your blog posts. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go over the same subjects? Thank you so much!

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