Posts tagged with "instagram"

Instagram 2.0 Now Available: Live Filters, New Camera UI, Faster Engine

Instagram, the iPhone-only social network for sharing photos with your friends, has released a major new version of their app today, which reaches version 2.0 and adds a number of new features, updated interface design, and a new icon.

The most notable change in Instagram 2.0 is the implementation of live filters. In previous versions of Instagram, every time you took a new photo with the app’s dedicated camera UI you had to apply a filter after the photo was taken, and if the filter was not okay for the photo, you were obviously forced to go back to main screen and re-shoot. Having to retake a photo to make it play nice with a selected filter could lead to several problems – your favorite “moment” may be gone forever, and you’d end up with multiple shots to choose from. In Instagram 2.0, the camera screen has been completely re-imagined to accomodate live filters and tilt shift – meaning, you can see how a filtered photo will look like before you take it.

Thanks to iOS’ powerful live image editing and photo-taking functionalities, the developers have been able to develop a solution that lets you instantly see how filters will apply to your photos – no need to shoot and apply separately.

From this new camera view, you can scroll filters at the bottom, or play with a series of buttons along the top. These buttons let you snap a photo without borders, activate/disable flash, swap cameras, or tweak live tilt-shift. The latter option is particularly amazing when seen in action, as it updates the camera view in real-time with different types of tilt-shift as you tap on the screen.

Alongside being able to see how filters will look like before taking a photo, Instagram version 2.0 comes with four new effects (Amaro, Rise, Hudson, and Valencia). Users can still decide to take a photo without effects and apply them later (simply don’t tap on the filters icon in the toolbar), but from what I’ve seen so far, performances of this update on the latest iPhone hardware really make for a fast and smooth experience when playing with live filters. We tested the feature on an old iPhone 3GS and the transition between effects was very smooth on that device, too. The Instagram developers say the new filter engine is up to 200 time faster than before.

Since the day we launched, one core part of the app has remain largely unchanged: the camera. In the past, we’ve added filters & tilt-shift, but the base technology has never evolved. Today that all changes as we introduce a complete upgrade to Instagram’s camera with a brand new technology layer.

See the world through Instagram’s stunning effects before you even snap a photo. Simply select a filter, hold the camera up to the scene and see the world through Instagram’s visual effects. We’ve re-written your favorite Instagram filters to be over 200x faster so even after having taken a photo, switching between them takes no time at all.

The new Instagram is also geared towards giving users more control over how their photos are snapped, and shared with the world. Besides being able to remove borders and rotate a photo after it’s taken, photos are now saved at much higher resolution in a device’s library – photo size has been increased from 612x612 to 1936x1936 on the iPhone 4 (1536x1536 on the iPhone 3GS). This was one of the biggest complaints with the original Instagram, and the developers are surely on the right path to deliver an app that’s equally fast at sharing photos, and saving them at high quality.

As the service is now nearing 10 million users, it’s interesting to look back at my initial review of Instagram last year and see how much has changed. In spite of the new features introduced today – a refreshed interface, live filters, higher photo sizes – Instagram is still the same app that allows users to share photos with a new “social paradigm”. Instagram has reinvented the way photos can be “beautified” and shared on mobile devices to multiple social networks, ultimately building a social network on its own that’s now attracting millions of users and popular brands.

You can find Instagram 2.0 on the App Store.

Instaview Giveaway, Unique Mac Instagram Viewer

We’re currently running a giveaway of Saver (for iPhone) and Foliozo (for iPad) - now its time for a third giveaway this week, a Mac app! We’re giving away 5 copies of Instaview, which at its core is a unique Instagram viewer for your Mac desktop. With Instaview you can create multiple ‘windows’ that each contain an Instagram stream, each window can also be customised with different frames and borders.

The streams available include everything from the Popular and your following feeds to location and tag-based streams and more. Just like the Instagram iPhone app you can comment and like images as well as follow (or unfollow) people. All in all, Instaview is a very customisable Instagram app for the Mac that also adds a nice touch of decoration to your Mac’s desktop.

Be sure to check out the full feature list of Instaview, which you can purchase from the Mac App Store for $7.99. However if you are interested in winning one of the 5 copies of Instaview that we are giving away, be sure to jump the break for all the details.

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150 Million Photos Uploaded on Instagram So Far

When you launch one of the world’s most popular photo service, how long does it take to reach 150 million uploads? Only nine months according to Instagram, whom launched their slam-dunk-app back in October of 2010. Instagram is celebrating this afternoon by showing off their favorite Instagram photos, and noting the success of their app thanks to the seven million users who’ve downloaded the app since its inception. That’s seven million people uploading at a rate of fifteen photos per second. Instagram’s success is well deserved: those guys got a top-notch formula down. From the Instagram team:

We’re constantly amazed by the range of photos shared on Instagram. People use Instagram to snap photos of everyday moments with friends and family and also to document significant personal moments, like weddings and honeymoons. There are Instagram photos from major events like the World Series and the Grammys, and some Instagram photos have even made the national news. Artists and celebrities have begun to give fans a unique look into their lives through photos, while brands like Burberry have started to realize the power of communicating with their followers through images.

Here’s to another 150 million.

For the post picture, we’ve re-posted the 150,000,000th photo according to Instagram from user @janefot. It’s a great pic too!

[Instagram blog via The Next Web]

Carousel Instagram Client Gets Gestures, Search, Refined UI

Back in May I reviewed the first version of Carousel, a beautiful Instagram client for Mac that, thanks to the Chameleon framework built by The Iconfactory, brought Instagram’s photo streams and profiles to the desktop with a gorgeous iOS-like user interface. Whilst in the past month, with Lion nearing its final release and the WWDC, we’ve seen several examples of iOS apps making the big leap to the Mac, Carousel was one of the first apps to try the iPhone-inspired approach with a vertical layout, tabs, and popover menus. Together with Twitterrific, Carousel is a fine example of iOS interface schemes coexisting with more standard Mac applications.

Carousel 1.1, released today, adds a number of new features and refinements to make the Instagram experience on OS X even more beautiful and easy to use. First off, search: you can now search for specific @users or #keywords on Instagram, pin your searches as you would in Twitter for Mac, or click on tags and usernames in photo comments, which now are better styled to indicate the original author’s caption. Saved searches sit below the search bar, but to perform a search you’ll have to choose an element from a popover menu. The app has gained a new “likes” tab to see all the photos you’ve liked and a fetch separator to start where you left off in the stream, but more importantly gestures are now supported to easily open a photo in Quick Look (pinch and zoom) or check out a profile (swipe on the photo). It feels very natural and smooth using a Magic Trackpad.

Among the little fixes and refinements, the developers have updated the iOS-like toolbar to make sure the selector is draggable (try it, neat animation in there) and the comment form remains visible even if you click outside of Carousel’s main window.

Carousel 1.1 is a solid update for the most beautiful and intuitive Instagram client currently available on the Mac. You can buy Carousel at $4.99 on the Mac App Store.

“iPhone Hooks” Now Allow Apps To Send Photos to Instagram

After the launch of an official API a few months back that allowed developers to read content posted on Instagram and display photos in external iOS, Mac and web apps, the service saw a huge growth in popularity, registered users, and connected applications capable of visualizing Instagram’s streams outside of the (only) official iPhone app. We have seen a plethora of iOS and Mac apps coming out in the past weeks, giving users the possibility to browse Instagram through a “client” different from the app, providing new interactions and interface schemes otherwise impossible without the use of an API. What the API lacks though, is read access to let 3rd-party apps upload to Instagram.

As MG Siegler at TechCrunch reports, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom has no plans on opening a full-read API to let other control the social stream and upload photos not generated with Instagram’s filters and requirements, but they do have a plan to allow developers to easily send files to the Instagram app. This feature is called “iPhone Hooks” and it sounds a lot like iOS’ default “Open In” menu combined with clever URI schemes: provided an application can snap photos and save them to jpeg or png, Instagram can let this app hook into the posting process to transfer the file from app x to Instagram. Just like in the 100 Cameras in 1 iPhone app, users can snap a picture and “send it to Instagram” to apply filters and upload. With iPhone Hooks, any photo app in the future could be updated to support sending a photo to the filter interface, or simply open a specific user stream, tag and location feed. The possibility to pass along photos is of course the most intriguing option, as apps like Photogene, Camera+ or Camera Genius could take advantage of that to shoot photos, let users apply filters and edits, then send to Instagram. iPhone Hooks apparently don’t let developers apply any sort of watermark or ID to the photo (example: “shot with Camera+”) as the file is still processed by Instagram; however, users could still leave a comment to specify what app they used, and overall it’s a good thing for a 3rd-party dev to have an app that works with Instagram.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom compares this functionality to the copy and paste functionality baked into iOS. But again, this is for images, not text. “We wanted to make it easier for other iPhone apps (and iPhone web-apps) to hook into Instagram to open a particular item or post a photo through our app,” co-founder Mike Krieger says. Yes, you read that correctly, this can work with web-based apps too.

Currently, only 100 Cameras in 1 is using this functionality, but Instagram says they’re discussing implementation with other partners.

More details from the Instagram Developer page:

When triggered, Instagram will immediately present the user with our filter screen. The image is preloaded and sized appropriately for Instagram. Other than using the appropriate image format, described above, our only requirement is that the image is at least 612px tall and/or wide. For best results, Instagram prefers opening a JPEG that is 612px by 612px square. If the image is larger, it will be resized dynamically.

An important note: If either dimension of the image is less than 612 pixels, Instagram will present an alert to the user saying we were unable to open the file.

The new feature can be tested in the 100 Cameras in 1 iPhone app, and it’s likely more developers will support it in the next weeks. With iOS 5 rumored to get direct Twitter integration for photos, sharing pictures on our iPhones and iPads could soon become a very different process.

Instamap for iPad Lets You Browse Instagram Photos By Location, Tags

Ever since the release of Instagallery in March, there haven’t been many Instagram clients coming to the iPad. Whilst the platform has seen an explosion of iPhone-connected applications, Mac and web tools aimed at enhancing the regular Instragram experience with features like postcard printing and screensavers, the iPad feels like it’s been left behind in the race to shipping the ultimate third-party Instagram app to browse photo streams with the comfort of a 9.7-inch screen. Instamap, a new app by NextRoot, is probably the nicest and simplest use of Instagram’s API that I’ve seen on the iPad so far. Available at $1.99 on the App Store, Instamap doesn’t let you upload photos but it’s got some clever maps-related features that you can use to browse photos by location – say you want to see Instagram pictures shot in Paris, just enter “Paris, France” in the search box and hit Go. Instamap will display a new photo stack on a map (If you choose map view) or a simple (animated) grid of photos for you to tap around, like, and comment. Similarly, in the same “subscriptions” section in the sidebar, Instamap enables you to enter a tag to browse photos associated to a specific keyword, useful if you’d like to see photos sorted by context rather than location. These subscriptions can be deleted and refreshed at any time – the grid design is beautiful and the animations pretty neat.

All the way down in the sidebar, Instamap also gives you access to your stream and currently popular photos on the service. While I generally avoid the Popular tab because I don’t care about vintage kitten photos and other people’s meals, the possibility to check out my feed within Instamap is really welcome. It would be even better with native uploads. I also would like to see buttons to load more photos and “shuffle” in a future update.

At $1.99, Instamap is an elegant and lightweight Instagram client that feels good on the iPad and works well in the way it can group photos by tag or location. Get the app here.

Instagram 1.8 Released: New Comment Screen, Autocomplete, Speed

A few days after announcing 4.25 million users in 7 months and roughly two weeks after the latest 1.7 update, Instagram just released version 1.8 in the App Store, adding the usual speed and stability optimizations and a couple of new interesting features. The app went under some speed-related updates before, but now it feels snappier than ever, really: I’m sure the future version 1.9 will make this statement obsolete, but Instagram 1.8 is fast at opening new screens, loading photos and comments. Speaking of which, the team reorganized the comment section to make it faster and more interactive – check out the screenshot above or simply try to leave a comment to a photo and see how it works for you. You get full access to a comment interface that, if you’re viewing your own photo, allows you to delete comment with a swipe or by hitting the gear icon in the upper right corner. In the text entry field, Instagram now comes with username autocompletion for faster writing and replies – just type the “@” symbol and Instagram will retrieve a list of users you can address a reply to. But more importantly, version 1.8 now lets me double-tap on photos to like them, which is incredibly more intuitive than hitting a dedicated heart-shaped button. Overall, it’s (once again) a nice update.

Get Instagram 1.8 in the App Store.

Instagram: 4.25 Million Users In 7 Months

With the launch of an official API and hundreds of connected applications proliferating in Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores, there was little doubt photo sharing service Instagram was off to a great success after a few months. Back in December, two months after public launch, it was reported the service had reached 1 million users – a pretty big milestone considering the app was (and still is) just an iPhone app to snap and share pictures. Instagram still doesn’t have an online interface to customize profiles and browse users, but thanks to the API it’s seen lots of different implementations the developers probably couldn’t even imagine last year.

As tweeted by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton this morning, Instagram has reached 4.25 million users in roughly 7 months. The impressive result has surely been made possible by the wide adoption of Instagram by Twitter celebrities, popular brands and Apple’s features in the App Store homepage – the fact that several Twitter clients and apps like Flipboard directly integrate with Instagram also helped founder Kevin Systrom and the rest of the team getting photos shared with the service off the ground.

Instagram has reached another important milestone and we’re sure there’s more to come in the next weeks. The team has been busy updating the app recently with new features and speed optimizations, though an iPad 2 counterpart or web app are still nowhere to be seen. [via BusinessInsider]

Screenstagram: An Instagram Screensaver On Your Mac

After the release of an official API months ago, Instagram has become a ubiquitous service that already has a plethora of third-party tools for Mac, Windows and iOS devices in spite of the lack of a website to browse photos and the fact that it still is “just an iPhone app.” The ecosystem built by Instagram is amazing, especially considering the kind of growth the developers had to face and the number of devs that suddenly signed up for the API to start creating external tools and toys like Postagram, an iPhone app that sends you real postcards based off Instagram photos. Like I said multiple times in the past, Instagram’s success on the iPhone has no equal. And we have seen there are some pretty good clients on the Mac, too.

If you feel like there’s never enough Instagram around, perhaps you should check out this new utility called screenstagram, a Mac screensaver based on, you guessed it, Instagram pictures. That’s it: just photos rotating on a grid once your Mac is in screensaver mode. The cool thing the developers added? You can log in with your account and have the screensaver serve photos found in your feed. Otherwise, screenstagram will simply use Instagram’s popular feed to deliver its magic to a sleeping OS X. The developers write on their blog:

It took us a while to figure out what to build with the new web service. We’re no strangers to leveraging that kind of resource, but it’s generally for data-driven services, like Twitter or Foursquare. It’s not too often that a visually rich system like Instagram comes along and releases an API. We wanted to do something that took advantage of the eye candy, something beyond a web-based photo browser – something to really showcase our friends’ grainy, bar room photography. A way we could sit with the photos and soak them in longer than usually allowed by the ephemeral, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach taken by the feed in the Instagram iPhone app. Once those photos are out of your friends’ feed, they’re sort of gone, never to be seen again without some digging on your part. So we decided on an old fashioned screen saver, a medium that doesn’t get much love these days.

The idea is very neat and well-implemented. We recommend you check it out here, as it’s a free and lightweight download. Read more