Instagram - page 18

We here at Cult of Mac just can’t get enough of Instagram. It’s really hard to not love the little photo sharing app, even after it got bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

Have you ever wondered why images upload so quickly in Instagram? The whole app feels super snappy, and images can seem to upload instantly after you take a picture and apply a filter. What kind of magic is going on in the background?

As it turns out, the app’s design tricks you into believing its working faster than it really is.

Having already treated himself to the hugely popular photo-sharing service Instagram earlier this month, there’s talk that Mark Zuckerberg could now be eyeing up a potential takeover of Viddy, a service that is often described as “Instagram for videos.” It would be the perfect companion to Facebook’s latest purchase.

Twitter feed of the week – possibly the year – has got to be Text-Only Instagram, which gently pokes fun at Instagram and the kind of photos you often see there.

“Latte with foam shaped like a heart,” it reports. And later, simply: “Feet.”

It’s satire, yes, but the problem is that it really works. Read those tweets and you instantly conjure up an image in your head that fits the description.

Don’t let the satire make you mad, Instagrammers! It’s just a bit of fun. And you can subvert it by making your Instagrams increasingly weirder. Someone might even start by, say, taking Instagrams of the the Text-Only Instagram Twitter feed. Oh wait, that’s started already.

You might not know this, but back in the 1700s there was no iPhone, and therefore — shockingly– no Instagram. It may also surprise you to know that the English were once forward looking, inventive and curious as a nation, and so they came up with their own way to grungify the views they saw on vacation, and (probably) their breakfasts.

There are few photo editing apps on for the iPad that are as versitle and easy to use as Snapseed while also giving users some great tools to make photos look better. It’s the best photo editting app on the iPad, but earlier today Snapseed released a new update for the app that makes it even better.

The dirty secrets surrounding Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram have remained relatively unkown, until now. Many were taken aback by the incredible amount of money Facebook dropped on the photography app, but it turns out that Instagram wanted more than $1 billion. It’s been revealed by The Wall Street Journal that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom originally pitched his app to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a price tag of $2 billion.

Episode 8 of The CultCast is in iTunes now, and if you’re itching for a new Macbook Pro, you’re not going to want to miss it.

Join us and special guest, Ars Technica Writer Chris Foresman, as we reveal the secrets of the rumored new Air-like Macbook Pro, and explain why Intel says it could pack a Retina Display; and Facebook just bought Instagram, is now the time to jump ship?

All that and lots more on this week’s CultCast — subscribe now on iTunes!

Episode 8 of The CultCast just hit iTunes, and this one is more action-packed than an Aw-nuld Schwarzenegger flick from the 1990s.

Join us and our pal, Ars Technica Writer Chris Foresman, as we divulge the secrets of the rumored new Air-like Macbook Pro; explain why Facebook just ate Instagram and what it means for you; and the scary new Flashback virus — is your Mac infected?

All that and lots more on this week’s CultCast — subscribe now on iTunes!

What a month it has been for Instagram. The lean and mean social photography app was just acquired by Facebook for a jaw-dropping $1 billion. Instagram for Android also launched at the beginning of April and has seen unprecedented growth.

Last we heard Instagram was wielding 30 million users, making it the biggest mobile-only social network in existence. According to new data, Instagram has now hit over 40 million users, and the app is averaging around one million new signups per day.

Disclaimer: Some of you may find this material offensive — you’ve been warned.

Jon Stewart gives us his take on last week’s most talked about tech news: Google’s glasses and Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for 1 billion dollars. It’s classic Daily News humor that includes ball-licking dogs, time-travelling cock-blockers and illicit drug innuendo. If that sounds like your kind of humor, head on past the break to watch the video. Cheers!

Have you ever wondered what the back of your favorite iPhone app icon looks like? Some icons are so well designed nowadays that they almost have a 3D look. Such is the case with the extremely detailed Instagram icon. Professional photographer and designer Cole Rise thought it would be interesting to envision the rear of the Instagram icon’s camera, so he threw together a beautiful concept.

With all the retro photo-filtering apps in the App Store, it might seem redundant to take the time and effort to actually fire up Photoshop Touch and do the dirty work ourselves. But as it is a rainy April afternoon here at Cult of Mac’s Spanish HQ, I figured why not? After all, the whole point of this stuff is to have some fun, right?

So here we have it: How to make Instagrams the hard way.

Picle, the photo/audio hybrid app launched a month ago at SxSW (and reviewed by us here), just got updated with some cool new features, the best of which is converting Picles to movies.

Still looking for an alternative to Instagram now that the Evil Empire has bought it up and is surely planning to suck it dry? There are a few options, including sticking with Instagram itself, but one alternative — Via.Me — has just added an Instagram import tool to make the transition as painless as possible.

Looks like Instagram’s billion dollar deal with the devil didn’t land it in hot enough water after all. Following widespread concerns regarding Instagram’s future from what was apparently a vocal minority, the popular photography app has soared to the top of the App Store.

For the first time in the app’s 16 months on the App Store, Instagram reigns as the most popular free app for the iPhone. Take that, haters.

For users, Facebook’s takeover of Instagram just plain sucks. No longer will we be able to share photos of our dog or our breakfast (or our dog’s breakfast) without wondering whether Uncle Zuck is looking over our shoulders. But it will keep happening for as long as great businesses fail to charge money for their services.

In the meantime, we can future-proof our social interaction so that when the underlying services disappear, or get too evil for our tastes, we can raze our accounts to the ground and still keep everything we did there.

To do this, we’re going to use a combination of Tumblr and the amazing IFTTT (If This Then That). And while this example shows how to archive and display your Instagrams, you could ditch Instagram altogether and post photos from your favorite grunge-photo app.

So you decided to quit Instagram. You already exported your photos with Instaport, but is that enough to stop the Evil Empire from mining your account for yet more information to sell to advertisers?*

What you need to do, my friend, is delete your Instagram account entirely. Luckily, it’s pretty easy, an almost one-click process — unlike quitting Facebook itself, which is all but impossible.

What. A. Day. The single most important mobile app acquisition to date has sent the internet into a flurry of disarray. In case you haven’t heard from everyone except your aged grandmother, Facebook has bought Instagram for a mouth-dropping $1 billion.

There will be (and already have been) thousands of articles written on the internet about this news today, and for good reason — it deserves discussion. But what exactly does this all mean for our beloved Instagram?

In what is being called the largest mobile app acquisition in history, Facebook’s $1 billion buyout of Instagram is landing the iPhone app’s founders in a boatload of cash. Instagram’s two co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, will cash in $500 million combined as a result of getting in bed with the social network behemoth. Quite the pay day for an app that’s been in the App Store for barley two years.

Now that Mark Zuckerberg controls your hipster, vintage-inspired photos that you took with Instagram, you might be feeling weighed down with the fear that your favorite photography app will see some major changes. I cried for a few minutes, then I realized that I never used Instagram to edit photos because its filters were actually very limited and pretty crappy. There’s tons of better apps out there. If for whatever reason you’re scared to stick with the new Instagram controlled by Facebook, there are plenty of alternatives to Instagram… and in many ways most of them are better. Take a look at these five awesome Instagram alternatives.

Banjo is an iPhone app that aggregates pretty much all of your social networks’ data in one place. And a new update has just added Instagram, making it pretty much the most comprehensive option yet. There is a problem, however: While the app itself is dead easy to set up, and even works with iOS 5’s own Twitter integration, it is a complete mess in use.

Did you just hear the news that Facebook paid a BILLION dollars for Instagram? Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m still dumbfounded by the news and mourning the loss of one of my favorite social networks. Sure, Zuck says that Instagram is going to operate as an independent entity and that they’re not going to make any changes. But I’m not buying it. How long will it be til Instagram is pressured to start monetizing their 30million+ users? And how are they gonna make that cheddar? Convert it in to a Facebook esque interface with recommendations and pop-up ads?

My friends, the world is a changing, and Instagram as we know it might not ever be the same again. Maybe I’m panicking worse than the First Class passengers on the Titanic. Maybe everything’s fine. Maybe it’s not. If you’re not certain about the future of Instagram but you want to keep all your sexy faux-vintage photos in your digital safe, there’s an easy-to-use service that will export all of your photos from Instagram. It’s called Instaport.me, and it’s actually pretty awesome.

Facebook just announced on its blog that the company has purchased the popular photo sharing app Instagram for a cool $1 billion. The news comes shortly after Instagram just launched its popular Android app, which has seen great success.

But the real success of Instagram is over on iOS, where the app has exploded to be one of the top apps on the iTunes App Store. Before its release on Android, Instagram boasted over 30 million users and added 1 million the day Instagram launched on Android.  Check out Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg’s announcement:

Richard Gray teaches what may be the UK’s first college-level iPhone photography class.

Gray, a street photographer whose work you can check out under the handle “rugfoot” on Twitter, Flickr and Instagram, just wrapped up the first course in iPhoneography at the photography department of Kensington & Chelsea College in London; the next two sessions of the five-week course start April 26 and May 31.

He shared with Cult of Mac the required app downloads for the class and the four most common mistakes iPhone photo students make.

The just-launched Instagram for Android is great news. Now all your Android-using friends who insisted on putting photos up on Facebook can finally leave the dark side. But will they get the same great Instagram experience as we do on the iPhone? Matthew Panzarino of the Next Web decided to find out, and loaded up his account on both his iPhone and a giant Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The surprise is that — in some respects — the Android version is better than the iPhone one.