The Instagram developers have been pretty busy recently. The service – which is actually “only” an iPhone app for now – skyrocketed to 100,000 users in its first week and rumor has it 1 million people signed up in the first month. That’s quite an achievement, right? There’s more: the developers quickly released updates to improve the performances of the app and fix bugs and also got Twitter to officially support pictures shared through Instagram on Twitter.com inline media viewer.
Put simply: Instagram is doing great. And with today’s update, we bet it’ll be doing even better. Read more
Earlier today we learned some Chinese accessory makers are already producing cases for an alleged “iPad 2”. Those cases clearly show a hole in the upper left corner for a rear-facing camera in the next iteration of Apple’s tablet.
“A rear-facing camera? On the iPad? How are you supposed to take pictures holding the iPad like a camera?” These are the questions going around today, the same we heard when the iPad was first unveiled and, well, lacked a camera.
iLounge posted a follow-up to their iPad 2 case story, with some predictions / hope about a possible rear camera in the iPad 2:
One thing that Apple really enjoys doing, particularly when adding a new feature to an established product, is rethinking things that competitors have attempted and gotten wrong.
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Picture the iPad in an advertisement looking out at a landscape, snapping a picture, and having the landscape appear on the iPad’s screen looking just like what your eyes were seeing. Or taking a picture of a group of people, then becoming the picture frame for the family photo. It sounds so simple, but with the lens on the back of the Galaxy Tab (or, say, the iPod touch) right now, that’s not happening.
Instagram Gains Native Twitter.com Support With Inline Viewer
We’re on a mission to give you more great multimedia content on Twitter, and today we’re adding five new companies to bring you independent TV shows, photos, works of art, slide presentations and entire songs, all right inside the details pane.
Check it out here. Seems like Instagram is really redefining the rules of mobile photo sharing, after all.
I downloaded this app last week, but it turns out it’s been around for quite some months in the App Store. Color Splash by Pocket Pixels is a simple iPhone app (iPad version is available, too) that allows you to highlight areas of a photo to make them black & white, or make the entire photo black & white and only set certain areas to be colored.
It’s a very cool effect that it’s made easy by iOS multi-touch technology and would otherwise be a rather difficult task for the average user on Adobe’s Photoshop. Read more
FlickExport by Connected Flow is a popular plugin for Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture which allows users to upload photos to online photo sharing service Flickr without having to leave the app. Today Connected Flow announced the release of a major update to FlickrExport, which reaches version 4.0 and, among a number of overall performance improvements and a simplified user interface, adds several new functionalities to an already powerful and full-featured package.
FlickrExport for iPhoto adds the possibility to upload videos, while both the iPhoto and Aperture versions got support for multiple Flickr accounts. All you have to do to add a new account is open FlickrExport’s window (which will sit on top of iPhoto or Aperture) and log in with your Flickr credentials. Switching between accounts is as easy as selecting one in a dropdown menu. Both versions are now also capable of uploading photos to multiple photosets, a much requested feature in version 3.x. Last, FlickrExport for iPhoto finally lets you edit a photo’s license once the photo is uploaded. Read more
One of the apps I was really looking forward to just showed up in the App Store: Occipital’s 360 Panorama 3.0 for iPhone has been released, and it rocks. This app allows you to take panoramic photos using your iPhone or iPod Touch camera, but unlike many other similar apps available, 360 Panorama doesn’t force you to take multiple shots, stop, take another shot, stop again and then merge all the photos you took.
Occipital’s app does all that in the background and adds an Augmented Reality layer to the iPhone’s camera, meaning that you’ll see a 360° grid on screen and you’ll just have to slowly move the camera around you to build your panorama. It’s almost magical. Read more
We love discovering and talking about new apps for the iPhone and iPad. In fact, we love covering apps so much that sometimes we feel a little guilty when we can’t seem to find the right app to feature on MS. This week though, also thanks to a huge Black Friday sale that kind of forced us to buy new apps, we’ve got plenty of material to feature.
Notica is a new iPhone app by Cleversome which aims at enabling you to collect the most important things, people and moments of your life inside a gorgeous and intuitive interface. Notica is a little, elegant app you might just fall in love with in a couple of minutes. Read more
There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do on my iPhone, but couldn’t: easily create and manage photo albums on the device without having to sync with the desktop. I wanted to be able to split photos in different albums, say one for wallpapers and one for my dog’s pictures.
Now, thanks to a tweak available in Cydia known as PhotoAlbums+, I can. Read more
We’ve heard a lot of stories about the iPad being used in many original and innovative ways. So many of them, actually, that it’s not easy to remember all the photos, videos and stories detailing the iPad as a revolutionary device used for something else than it was originally meant to – a portable computer.
Today we take the iPad-related stories a step further with this video where photographer and filmmaker Jesse Rosten (hey, he’s the same guy behind iPad + Velcro, the video that even got featured by Apple) used an array of 9 iPads as a light source for a model photoshoot. With a light background at full brightness, the iPads managed to generate enough light to let Jesse shoot the great pictures you can see in the video below. Read more
