Over the last decade, the iPhone has become a completely reliable tool in the magician’s arsenal. There are a mind-boggling number of apps at your disposal, so we’ve listed some of the best. Your author has been deliberately vague to protect the secrets of the tricks. There’s more than enough info to get you started, though. The truly curious will be able to find what they’re looking for.
Marc Kerstein
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Marc Kerstein, the godfather of magic apps. This isn’t even all of them, but it’s more than enough to get you started.
- WikiTest: An instant classic that’s only aged with time. Marc’s continued improvement of the pairing system means that you have a plethora of logical methods at your disposal. You can truly figure out anything someone looks up on Wikipedia. It’s worth picking up.
- Xeno: You can capture any thought totally impromptu. Someone scrolls through a page on their phone and you can tell them what it is.
- Earworm: Predict any song that someone is thinking of. This is made better with an accomplice, but can absolutely be done alone.
- ISO: This shouldn’t be legal. I’m not going to go into the details on the internet. It’s really good and it really works. You should get it.
- Inertia: How would you normally scroll through your phone? You would just scroll. Except with inertia, you control where the audience member stops scrolling, meaning you can force an item on Amazon, for example, or a spot in a news article. I can’t emphasize how logical Kerstein’s apps are. They feel like what you would do in real life.
