Admiring the details of your friend’s amazing vacation pics on Instagram is going to require a whole lot less squinting, thanks to a new update that finally brings zooming to the popular social network.
Creating your own Snapchat geofilter for parties and other special occasions just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new web-based tool Snapchat unleashed on the world today.
With competition intensifying from Instagram’s new Stories feature, Snapchat is expanding the revenue it gets from geofilters by charging a small fee to create your own for a short period of time. The tool lets users either upload their own art or modify existing templates, setting up custom filters to be the next big thing.
Apple’s next big venture could be to go head-to-head with Snapchat and similar content-sharing services. The company is expected to integrate new video features into iOS that would be developed by the engineers behind Final Cut and iMovie.
But is this a good idea? Apple failed miserably when it tried to take on social networks before, and some would argue that many of its products already suffer as a result of its expansion into new areas.
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we battle it out over whether Apple is wasting its time trying to fight Snapchat.
Twitter is taking the fight to Snapchat and Instagram by opening Moments up to all. The feature will initially be available to influencers, partners, and brands — but all Twitter users will be able to get their hands on it “in the coming months.”
Instagram is rolling out a new feature that lets you post more privately and without the kind of permanence that can get you in trouble.
Sound familiar, Snapchat users?
On its blog Tuesday morning, the company introduced Instagram Stories, which lets you share multiple photos and videos in a single slideshow. It can be shared with select followers without showing up on your more public profile. It then disappears 24 hours later.
Accomplished photographers tend to bristle when asked to talk about equipment. It’s not the camera that makes the picture, it’s the photographer.
Acclaimed photographer Richard Koci Hernandez would tend to agree, but he’s likely to gush about his camera anyway. That’s because some of the most interesting and satisfying work of his career has come from shooting with his iPhone.
The kind of gear that once helped Hernandez garner Pulitzer Prize nominations now rests idly in a camera bag.
Instagram is going to make it easier to understand posts in foreign languages. In the coming months, the service will rollout a new translate button that will help you understand the full story, no matter which language it was posted in.
The human race shows no signs of photo fatigue. Unequivocal proof comes from Instagram, which just announced it reached the 500 million membership milestone.
The photo-sharing app more than doubled its monthly user base over the past two years and Instagrammers now share some 95 million photos and videos each day.
The paint is still drying on iOS 10 after just being unveiled earlier this week, but one UI designer has already come up with an amazing redesign of the Notifications screen, and we hope Apple’s paying attention.
Notifications have a bigger emphasis than ever on the lock screen now that Slide to Unlock is dead, however the way Apple displays them is kind of ugly if you get multiple notifications from the same app.
Instagram’s latest update makes it far easier to post from other iOS apps, thanks to a new shared extensions feature which allows users to upload images directly from their image rolls in apps such as Photos.
Here’s how you do it.
Mainland China is Apple’s second biggest market, and will one day be its first. The company is making a big push on the mainland, opening new stores and investing in home-grown companies. Why the interest? Because China is the new Japan — it’s where the future is happening. All this week we take a look at the cutting-edge apps that define mobile life on the mainland.
SHANGHAI CITY, China — Just like their U.S. counterparts, Chinese youth obsess over their smartphones. But while the phones they use look the same, the apps are quite different: China has its own must-have apps that keep users’ eyes glued to screens at all hours of the day.
Some Chinese apps seem quite similar to their Western counterparts, but others boast innovative and intriguing features. Apple’s clearly interested: While slowing growth in China put a dent in APPL stock, Cupertino recently made a strategic $1 billion investment in Chinese Uber rival Didi Chuxing.
What other apps in China might grab Apple’s attention? Tim Cook could start his due diligence with this list of powerhouse Chinese iPhone apps. The country’s young people use these apps to listen to music, make purchases, get around town, interact with others and maintain their online identities.
These Chinese apps are impressive and convenient, and they are showing us the future of mobile: a world where everything is at our fingertips.
In the same week that Apple cut App Store approval wait times to just one day, here are the apps Cult of Mac was focused on. If you’re looking to find out what was rocking the App Store over the past seven days, check out our picks below.
Instagram is rolling out a brand new user interface on iPhone that ditches bright colors to make your photos look even prettier… but no one really cares about that. The real news is the brand new logo that comes with it.
Filled with beautifully bright colors like a sweet acid trip, it’s the first new logo Instagram has had since it launched five years ago, and it replaces the familiar retro camera, which was starting to look a little long in the tooth.
It’s not just you. Finding major apps in the App Store has become practically impossible this morning for iPhone and iPad users, according to numerous reports on Twitter.
Apple has acknowledged that there is currently an problem with the App Store for all users. The glitch replaces search results for apps like Twitter, Instagram and Spotify with third-party apps from the same category.
Instagram is about to start looking a lot more like Facebook, thanks to new business profiles pages that are in the testing phase.
Images of the new profiles have leaked onto the internet and they appear to be similar to Facebook’s brand pages, giving visitors more information on how to locate a business. It seems the days of publicly displaying your email and phone number on Instagram are coming to an end.
A 10-year-old with insane hacking skills just scored a $10,000 payout from Facebook for uncovering a serious flaw in Instagram.
The Helsinki-based boy, who can’t even open a Facebook account for another three years, found he was able to alter code on Instagram’s servers to delete comments posted by any account.
Make the most of your Instagram feed with these eight killer Instagram tips and tricks that will make you an Insta-master.
Learn how to put together video in the Instagram app itself, keep stalkers off your Instagram feed, find amazing photos near your current location, and much more.
Facebook is bringing more algorithms to bear to predict exactly what you’ll want to see in your News Feed, according to a post on its Newsroom site today.
The social-media platform has been tinkering for years with the processes that determine what actually makes it to your screen. But these latest “improvements” might prove even more restrictive and detrimental to publishers than the loss of the chronological feed, and they could inspire other services to make similar changes.
Here’s what Facebook is doing to your News Feed now.
Instagram gets personal in hopes of helping you find interesting shared videos much more easily with a new feature in the Explore area of its popular photo sharing service.
Called “Videos You Might Like,” the new personalized channel can be found in the Explore grid within the mobile app. Now you can spend less time slogging through the junk and get right to the good stuff.
An update this week has given Instagram a new superpower: You can now stitch together several clips into a single video in the app. Some of the process and details are a little unclear, however, so we’re here to help walk you through it.
Here’s how to make your classic montages in Instagram.
Epson’s new all-in-one printer, the Epson XP-430, positions itself as an affordable wireless printer that also integrates with the photos on your social networks. You can use the included Epson Creative Print software to link your Instagram account and print out your photos, plus scan and share photos directly to your Facebook. It’s pretty nifty, considering printers are typically some of the most tedious gadgets on the planet.
Instagram has a fair amount of filters, but boy everyone uses them all the time. You know a photo’s come from the photo-sharing social network when you can call out the filters on it: X-Pro, Hefe, Clarendon!
If you’re looking to stand out from the crowd, check out AfterLight, a sweetly-priced iOS app for iPad (and iPhone) with over 74 amazing filters and effects (and that’s just the free ones) to make your photos the envy of all the other basic Instagram users out there.
Here’s how to make best use of AfterLight’s massive toolset.
Head into the App Store and get the latest Instagram update because it solves a huge problem: You can finally log out of your account. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a breakthrough new feature, but it is now if you’ve been severely confused about how to escape lately.
Once an app only for photos, Instagram is now greatly extending its video capabilities. Coming soon, users will be able to share videos up to 60 seconds in length. Instagram started rolling out this change today and says more improvements to video are coming in a future update.
One such improvement Instagram says will arrive sooner rather than later is the reemergence of multi-clip video on iOS. This means that you’ll be able to import multiple video clips from your Photos library and stitch them together for a single Instagram video. It might sound familiar because Instagram actually used to have this feature… before taking it away.
An online petition asking Instagram to reverse its decision to get rid of chronological order in users’ feeds has gathered almost 50,000 signatures in a day.
The request emerged after the photo-sharing platform announced yesterday that it intends to switch to algorithm-based ordering “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting, and the timeliness of the post.”
User resistance has been immediate, fierce, and completely opposed, surprising no one.
