Pump out beats from the palm of your hand
Plus, step into a mysterious world and settle down to writing your novel
By Tim Martin
Minirig Mini speaker £99 There’s an extraordinary purity of intention behind these miniature Bluetooth speakers. They don’t do gesture control or 360° surround sound. They just kick out fabulously loud music, with reproduction of such wondrous quality that it should appeal to audiophiles and party animals alike. The newest model doesn’t have the days-long battery life of its bigger brothers, lasting around 30 hours. But they’re the size of a tea cup, so much more portable. You can string together as many Minirigs as you can muster and an app lets you massage the base settings to your heart’s content. A raucous rave in a small package.
Gorogoa Windows/iOS/Nintendo Switch £11.99/$14.99 This intricately illustrated, entirely wordless puzzle game looks like a comic book from another planet. In beautifully hand-drawn images, it tells an affecting story that hovers at the edge of comprehension: something about ageing, something about loss, something about a fabulous creature that haunts a Borgesian city of labyrinths and impossible doors. The real attraction is the game engine, which lets you peel away elements of the drawings and recompose new images from the pieces. A painting becomes a portal; three pictures merge into a seamless whole; characters step across panel divides. Both as a game and as a graphic narrative, it’s unique.
■Scrivener iOS £19.99/$19.99 There’s something a bit gruesome about the suggestion that everyone’s got a book inside them – you imagine it lurking, like the creature in “Alien”, somewhere behind the lungs and heart . But if you think you do, Scrivener is the app to tease it out. The desktop version has had a cult following for years but its vast battery of features is finally available on a mobile app. Designed to structure and edit, Scrivener placidly holds all your research, notes, pictures, fragments, sketches and web clippings as you shuffle them. A clever system of virtual binders and indexes removes most of the hair-tearing as you compile the final draft. This is a godsend not just for budding novelists but for anyone composing a document longer than a shopping list.
ILLUSTRATIONS ANDY MARTIN
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