Ocarina maker Smule back with a holiday iPhone app, Zephyr

Nearly everyone agrees that Ocarina is one of the coolest iPhone applications to come out this year. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Smule created the app to turn your iPhone into a musical instrument and share your music with others around the world. And today they’ve launched another app along those lines, but with more of a holiday theme: Zephyr [iTunes Link].

While Zephyr isn’t quite as cool as Ocarina [iTunes] — there’s no blowing into iPhone’s microphone to create music this time — it adds another element: Messages. You see, you create music on Zephyr by touching the screen. While you could just draw gibberish, the point is to send a holiday message (the writing is in snow flakes) to someone elsewhere in the world. For example, in testing out the app, I’ve already gotten the messages “Peace” and “Happy Holidays,” accompanied by the music produced from writing those statements (see video below).

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If you like the message and/or the music, you can “love” it by hitting the heart icon on the screen. This will ensure that the message keeps getting passed around the world to more listeners.

It’s also neat that if you’re in the middle of writing a message and mess up or decide you don’t like what you’ve written, you can use the iPhone’s multi-touch screen to delete parts simply by placing two fingers on the screen and tracing back over it. You can also shake the iPhone to delete the message in its entirety.

Besides Ocarina and now Zephyr, Smule previously released Sonic Lighter [iTunes], another app that has global sharing features built-in. The company also recently started sharing its core technology with other third-party app makers so that they could build similar apps like Electric Smoke [iTunes].

Zephyr is $0.99 in the App Store.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXqQsfCKY8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&w=480&h=385]