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.
Apple’s App Store approval process is a mysterious thing. Sometimes the Cupertino overlords can be incredibly stringent about the guidelines an app has to adhere to in order to be approved for sale onthe App Store, and other times we’re all left scratching our heads wondering how on earth an app like this made it through.
Siri knockoffs are nothing new, of course. In fact, they’ve been a pretty common occurrence in the iOS App Store ever since Apple unveiled the digital assistant alongside the iPhone 4S last October. We’ve seen apps like Evi that piggyback off Siri’s success, but a relatively new app has seen incredible success by riding Siri’s coattails all the way to the top of the App Store charts.
The best part? Not only does it look heavily — ahem — inspired by Siri, even the developer doesn’t know how it got approved.
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.
When I first heard about Drafts, I thought “What’s the point?” After all, who needs an app in which to draft messages before sending them off to Twitter, or mailing them, or otherwise disseminating them to the world at large? My Twitter and mail apps take care of that already.
And then I used it, and it has turned into possibly the handiest little note-taking app I have on my iPod Touch.
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.
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.
About.me has been creating significant buzz as a popular web service for creating personality profiles. You can create a free, one-page website with About.me to share your bio, social network activity, work links, photos and more.
Today, the folks at About.me are announcing their official iPhone app for free in the App Store.
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.
Aereo is a great service for denizens of New York City. For $12 per month, you get to stream local live TV direct to your iPad, iPhone, Roku box, Apple TV, or just about anything with an internet connection. It’s simple, it does nothing but relay the free-to-air channels already available to any New Yorker, and of course the TV companies are already trying to shut it down.
A jailbreak tweak called Aero reinvents the interface for multitasking on the iPhone. With Aero, you use a list of animations and effects to create your optimal multitasking environment in iOS 5. It completely changes the feel of switching between apps.
Memoir Tree is a new oral history for capturing memorable moments – including those goofy things your kids say while away at pre-school or that look on your grandfather’s face as he tells those war tales.
Although there might be more iPhone diary and journal apps than pages of the daily doings of Samuel Pepys, the folks behind Memoir Tree want their iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad app to become the app of record for schools, nursing homes, museums and at events, too.
The new American Pie film American Reunion is set to open in theaters this Friday, April 6th. To help promote the movie, Universal Pictures thought it’d be a great idea to release an app called Stifler’s App Suite featuring a soundboard of all the various raunchy sayings of the series’ infamous support character, Stifler.
Looks like Stifler was too hot for the App Store to handle, though. An anonymous source has exclusively told Cult of Mac that Apple’s App Store review team has rejected the app due to foul language. The rejection has forced the Universal team to resubmit a watered-down version of the app. Stifler’s hardly even himself anymore.
When Cliff Weitzman emailed me about his Black SMS iPhone app, I was impressed by the pitch alone. An App Store app that encrypts text messages and emails between iPhones and iPads? Sign me up!
Black SMS accomplishes a task that I haven’t seen anything from the App Store come close to replicating. It does indeed encrypt your texts and emails so that they are unreadable without the Black SMS app and an associated password. CIA agents and paranoid boyfriends should take notice of this one.
I’m not sure if Kickstarter is the best place for software projects, especially complex ones involving video editing. That said, I like the look of Vival quite a bit. It look like the perfect way to sweep up all those little clips I snap on my iPad and iPod Touch, and automagically turn them into montages.
After years of tweaking and improvement, ioShutter is finally here. ioShutter is a simple cable that connects your iPhone to your camera and allows you to control it using an app. Remote shooting, time-lapse sequences and even photos triggered by sound can all be programmed in easily using the free companion app. And best of all, no fancy dock connectors are required: ioShutter connects through the headphone jack.
If further proof were needed that Instagram integration is the new Dropbox integration, then the updated Camera Awesome is it. The iPhone app, from photo-sharing site SmugMug, doesn’t post direct to Instagram like the recently updated Hipstamatic, but it will send your photo to the Instagram app at the touch of a button.
You know the drill. You take a walk around a nearby neighborhood at dusk, when it’s dark enough that people have switched their lights on, but not late enough that they have closed their drapes. You glance through the windows and get a tiny, thrilling glimpse into their private world.
But what if you want to get even creepier? How many bedrooms does that house have? How much is it worth? Does it have heating? The answers to these questions can be had using an iPhone app called HomeSnap. Just snap a photo of the home, and it will pull up the details in seconds.
Process is a new take on photo editing apps. It’s simple, fast, powerful and has some very clever ideas about how we edit our photos. The in-app introduction describes it as a “non-linear editor for photos,” and that’s not far from the mark.
In the five years since the iPhone Photography Awards (IPPA) launched, the iPhone camera has gone from disappointing to out-snapping Nikon as the most popular camera on Flickr.
As the March 31 deadline for this year’s award approaches, IPPA founder Kenan Aktulun talks to Cult of Mac about his favorite pics, the distinction between good and great iPhone photos and why apps may not help you create them.
The app privacy scandal caused by Path’s iPhone app is still leaving its mark, as members of the U.S. Congress have sent out letters to 33 prominent App Store developers to better understand the issue. “We want to better understand the information collection and use policies and practices of apps for Apple’s mobile devices with a social element.”
Apps like the official Facebook and Twitter clients are among the list. Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry A. Waxman and Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee Ranking Member G. K. Butterfield have requested that the developers behind such apps reveal how Apple imposes its privacy standards and how the standards are implemented.
Instagram is undoubtedly the reigning champion of social photography apps, but there was once a time when Hipstamatic owned the spotlight. As the mobile app that took the trend of filtered photo sharing mainstream, Instagram owes a lot of its success to Hipstamatic. Apple awarded the iPhone app of the year award to Hipstamatic in 2010 and the torch was passed to Instagram in 2011.
As of today, Hipstamatic will now let you send photos you take in the app to Instagram. Not only does this move establish Instagram as the iPhone photography app victor, but it also establishes the app in its own right as a social network of the same caliber as Twitter for Facebook.
Something you may have noticed while playing with your new iPad is that many iPhone apps now look much better when expanded to fill the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen. You’ve always been able to run iPhone apps on the iPad in their shruken, non-Retina resolution. Tapping the little ‘2x’ button would instantly make the app expand to fill the display. An unfortunate side effect was that enlarged iPhone apps on the iPad looked pretty awful.
Thanks to the new iPad’s stunning 2048×1536 Retina display, iPhone apps now look much better when zoomed in on the tablet’s shiny screen.
A new jailbreak tweak adds push notifications to the popular iPhone email app called Sparrow. We’ve already shown you a roundabout way to get push for Sparrow with the Boxcar app on a non-jailbroken iPhone, but you can now easily enable notifications with a Cydia tweak called Sparrow Push.
There is, you may be aware, a new iPad launching today, along with its fancy new camera. That’s great and all, but what if you a) don’t want one b) live outside the first wave of launch countries or c) just don’t care?
Then why not make a little improvement to the camera already in your iPhone or iPod Touch, with a little app called CameraSharp which, today at least, is free? CameraSharp is an app with a single purpose: to make taking photos easier.