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Posts tagged with "instagram"

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

Instagram 1.7 Released, Brings New Profile View

While we’re still playing with Carousel and looking at its beautiful interface for the Mac, Instagram – the official app – has received a majore update on the iPhone that reaches version 1.7 and adds a number of new features, alongside the omnipresent speed improvements and stability enhancements (for older phones this time). Instagram 1.7 brings custom notifications for likes and comments – in the Edit Profile screen, you can specify whether you want to receive notifications from everyone, people you follow, or simply turn them off. This is a welcome addition if you were being annoyed by continuous notifications and badges. In the same screen, you can now add a Bio to display on your public profile. And profiles have gotten a brand new grid view as well, which makes it easy to check out photos at a glance on profiles that have hundreds, if not thousands, of uploads.

Instagram 1.7 is available now in the App Store.

Carousel Is A Beautiful Instagram Client for Mac

Back in April we covered Instadesk, the first Instagram client for Mac that, through an interface design similar to iTunes and iPhoto, allowed you to browse Instagram photos, users, likes and comments directly from your desktop. The app was one of the thousands of results coming from the launch of the Instagram API, a set of tools that enable third-party developers to plug into your Instagram feed to retrieve photos uploaded by you or relevant to you. Of all the Instagram-connected apps we’ve covered, Instadesk saw a huge success as it was the first one to land on the Mac App Store.

Carousel, however, wants to step the game up by offering a beautiful and slick way to access Instagram from your Mac with a design that’s heavily inspired by iOS, yet runs natively on OS X. I don’t know if the developers are using the Iconfactory’s Chameleon framework for this, but it certainly looks like Carousel has some similarities with Twitterrific – the Twitter client from the Iconfactory that shares it codebase across the Mac, iPhone and iPad. So what’s this all about? First off, Carousel presents a minimal, vertical-oriented interface as if you were looking at your iPhone’s screen in portrait mode while browsing Instagram. The photo stream is embedded directly into the app’s window, with beautiful Instagram photos to flick through as they load. At the bottom, three tabs allow you to switch between your feed, popular photos and your profile. Every photo can be enlarged via Quick Look, saved locally on your Mac, or commented / liked thanks to a wide selection of keyboard shortcuts to choose from.

In Carousel, you can open every user’s profile to check out their photos. You can comment and like pictures, too, with interaction happening inside an iOS-like popover that resembles Twitterrific’s implementation of conversation views and profiles. You can even view if a user’s following you, or if you’re following him. Last, the app can be themed. Carousel’s default theme is already gorgeous in my opinion, but you can switch to a classic Mac or red one from the Settings.

Carousel can be downloaded for free, or you can purchase a license at $4.99 (introductory price) from the developer’s website. More screenshots below. Read more

Instagram 1.6.5 Gets More Tiltshift And It’s Faster

A new update to Instagram for iPhone was released a few minutes ago in the App Store, and it looks like Burbn’s main goal with this app really is to make sharing photos as fast as possible. Just as with the recent 1.6 update, Instagram’s performances have been improved to make the overall navigation faster, more responsive and less buggy when switching between sections. The difference is notable and makes resuming the app from the multitasking tray or tapping quickly on the bottom bar’s tabs a pleasure. The developers say the new Instagram also has “image quality improvements when choosing from library.” I usually don’t pick photos to share on Instagram from the iOS camera roll, but that’s a welcome addition nevertheless.

Instagram 1.6.5 also get a new filter – or, an expansion to the existing tiltshift mode. Alongside regular tiltshift introduced a few months ago, the developers added a “radial” variation that should come in handy when applying the effect to large objects or multiple ones in focus. You can download the latest Instagram update from the App Store.

Instagram 1.6 Gets A New Filter, Speedier Performance

Instagram is available in the App Store right this second for an update to 1.6, which includes a new filter (Brannan), improved network performance for faster uploads and downloads, and stability and bug fixes related to cameras on iOS 4 enabled devices. Instagram aims to solve both memory and performance issues with subtle network tweaks and camera fixes that are minor, but keep the everyone’s favorite photo utility snappy as you take pictures and share the results with friends. The new Brannan filter offers a new effect to play with in editing your shots, offering yet another faded vintage look (reminds me of Earlybird but lighter) . You can download the newest update from the App Store.

Postagram: Print Postcards From Your Instagram Photos

A few days after Instagram launched its official API, web services and third-party applications promising integration with the popular photo sharing platform started popping up on the Internet and, as it usually happens, most of them were just cool experimentations not meant for massive usage on a large scale. That’s why we called Instaprint, a device that plugged into Instagram to print Polaroid-like photos, the coolest use of Instagram’s API we had seen. In the past weeks, you might have noticed we covered other interesting apps that rely on the API to deliver photos from Instagram on otherwise unsupported platforms like, for example, the Mac.

Clearly inspired by what Instaprint did with the mini-printer, Postagram is an actually working service and app available in the App Store that allows you to turn your Instagram photos into physical glossy postcards at 300 dpi. The concept is simple: you download the free app, log in with your Instagram account and grant authorization to Postagram. Once logged in, all you have to do is pick a photo from your Instagram stream, and choose to make it a postcard that will be sent to you in 2-5 business days (if you live in the United States). Printing a postcard costs $0.99 right now – the price will likely go up in the next weeks once this initial promotion is over – but users who sign up now can print a photo for free. I did, and I should receive it next week. The process is really super-easy, and you can also enter a personal message if you want – by default, the app picks the description from an Instagram photo (see screenshot above).

Postagram lets you send an Instagram postcard to any recipient, and if you’re planning on sending multiple ones the app will be able to remember previous choices so you don’t have to re-enter an address every time. You can enter credit card information in-app, but there’s no interface to track the status of a shipment – likely because it happens through regular postage. Furthermore, if you don’t like having your photo inside a postcard you can pop it out and end up with a single square in your hands, perfect for – say – your desk.

You can download Postagram from the App Store now and start ordering prints right away. We think this is a great idea – it’ll be huge for vacations this summer, if only the service will start offering discounts on large sets of photos – and I look forward to getting my postcard next week. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

Instadesk: The First Instagram Client for Mac

Thanks to Instagram’s huge success and the release of an API that allows third-party developers to plug into the service to fetch images, user information and much more, in the past weeks we’ve seen the quick rise of dedicated Instagram clients for iOS that don’t focus on shooting and uploading new images (the API doesn’t allow that, yet) but instead turn Instagram’s social aspect into a central part of the experience. Apps like Instagallery for iPad or the popular Flipboard make great use of Instagram’s API and third-party tools by letting you browse popular photos and read comments directly from the tablet’s larger screen; they also let you like and comment on pictures, see your own photos and profile or follow other people. Photo taking capabilities aside, these apps are proving that there’s a whole world of social interactions and media behind “a simple iPhone app” that deserves to be studied and implemented through native software for iPhones and iPad. Not to mention other clever experiments with the Instagram API we have covered on MacStories, such as printed photos and web apps.

But what about the Mac? When you follow a link to an Instagram picture from, say, your Twitter client of choice, the photo will open into the web browser. Instagram’s website lets you see the photo at higher resolution and check out the author’s details, but there’s no “social backend” to browse photos and people just yet. Instadesk, a new app available in the Mac App Store, wants to bring Instagram’s full experience to the desktop. The app has a clean and nice design with thumbnail previews and beautiful icons in the top toolbar; it enables you to create local “albums” to save photos for later; it lets you share photos from you or others through a variety of social networks supported by Instagram.

Instadesk is a full-featured Instagram client built specifically for the Mac. Once you’ve authorized the app with your credentials and granted permission to access your account through the API, Instadesk will place a link to your profile in the sidebar, right below links to the feed, most popular photos and tags, and status updates. In the profile tab you can check out all your photos, people you follow and your followers. As you click on a thumbnail in Instadesk, the photo is automatically brought in the foreground with a slick animation and a new screen that shows the author on the right (with buttons to follow / unfollow) as well as comments and likes,  and a box to leave a new comment yourself. You can like a photo or open it in the web browser, download it locally on your computer or hit the Share button to share the instagr.am link with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and email contacts.

The popular section offers a selection of the most viewed photos and tags, whilst the Feed displays items posted by you and the people you follow. Instadesk also comes with a slideshow functionality and a “find user” option to manually search for a person on Instagram.

Instadesk provides a nice way to browse Instagram from your Mac. At $1.99 in the Mac App Store, it’s not a bad deal if you’re a loyal (and addicted) Instagram user. More screenshots below. Read more

Instagram 1.5 Released: Tilt-Shift Effect, News Feed

Image sharing service Instagram, very popular thanks to its 2 million users but still available as an iPhone-only app, has released a new update today bringing the application to version 1.5. The new Instagram introduces a new effect, performance improvements for previous ones, a completely revamped news feed and the possibility to share photos via email.

The new filter, Tilt-Shift, comes after several requests from users that were forced to apply this specific effect in other iPhone apps like Tiltshift Gen; now Instagram integrates the possibility to blur a portion of an image with a slider directly into its interface without leaving the app. All you have to do is pinch to adjust the orientation of the blur and focus area. Other filters got a speed bost as well and now feel much more responsive, especially on iOS 4.3.

The major new feature, however, is the News Feed that’s been redesign to include more activity from your friends. Together with follow and comment notifications, you can now see what your friends are doing, the comments they post, the photos they like and the people they start following, too. I’m not sure I like this News Feed as it brings a lot more social information into the stream and it might get annoying over time, but we’ll see. For now, it’s clear that Instagram is moving towards a more social approach besides the “simple app that takes photos” concept.

Upon taking a picture, you can also share it via email to your friends and family. I’m pretty sure this sharing option should also allow you to drop pictures onto your Dropbox using this service, and I’ll make sure to try it later. This is a welcome addition to the app. Last, you can tap & hold a username to initiate a reply – I don’t use Instagram much to reply to people but I guess the heavy Instagrammers out there will insanely love this option.

Instagram 1.5 is propagating now in the App Store; it’s available for free here. Check it out, it’s a nice update. More screenshots below.

Update: Associating a Send To Dropbox email address to Instagram won’t let you automatically save photos into your Dropbox. Just a text file with the email you shared.

Read more

Flipboard 1.2 Is Out: Instagram Integration, Faster, Search

A major new version of Flipboard, the social iPad magazine, was released a few minutes ago, and it’s a rather big update since the “iPad app of the year” was first released last summer. Flipboard 1.2, now available in the App Store, comes with ful Instagram integration to let users browse Instagram pictures as if they were flipping through a full-size photo album. It looks great on the iPad, photos are much bigger than the native iPhone Instagram app, and all of this has been achieved thanks to the Instagram API we covered a few times in the past.

Thanks to a new feature called “social search”, users can also browse for specific words and hashtags inside Flipboard. This was a much requested functionality that adds a lot of value to the app, which now can not only display content from your favorite online sources, but also search for relevant fresh one.

Flipboard 1.2 is faster thanks to a new backend engine, features a refresh button to check for new articles at any time without closing and restarting the app, has a Featured section at the top to browser editors’ picks. Again, another way to find great content you might like and read in Flipboard.

Flipboard 1.2 is available in the App Store here. In case you missed them, check out our previous reviews of the app here and here. Read more