Sampletoy/PicSay Pro

The proliferation of applications has been a boon for creative hobbyists. Software that would previously have carried a hefty price tag and required expensive tech to run is now available to download for next to nothing. The advantages professional creatives enjoyed are slowly being whittled away by an army of small developers. Sampletoy (iPhone, mrkbrz.com, £1.19) for example is a combination of sampler and synthesiser – a great tool for professional and amateur musicians alike. It allows the user to capture any sound and then manipulate it on the go, making excellent use of the phone's multitouch screen to alter the pitch and add effects. If that all sounds a bit complex, it can also be used to make friends sound like Smurfs. Simple pleasures. Similarly, PicSay Pro (Android, Shinycore, picsaypro.com, $1.99) offers advanced photo manipulation tools for a tiny price, and there's also a free Lite version, lacking some of the more advanced features. PicSay allows you to do almost anything. There's the technical, such as playing with tint, exposure and colour temperature, but also adding speech bubbles (I can haz lolcats on the move!), selectively decolourising an image to leave a Sin City-esque flash of colour (see left), or cutting and pasting bits of one image on to another.