It was only a matter of time before somebody put a SIM card inside a camera. That camera is the Q, comes from Sweden and is – according to the pitch – “world’s first social camera.”
But is it too late?
Squaready is one of my most-used photo apps on iOS. It has one purpose: to take your rectangular photos and turn them into squares by padding the edges, letting you post them intact to Instagram.
The trouble is, it’s ugly as sin, with the kind of interface that you’d expect to see if Linux and Windows XP got drunk on cider one night and had a little “surprise” appear nine months later.
Happily, Squaregram exists, and its a lot prettier. It also now works with Camera+, and has had some UI tweaks to make it even better.
It’s hard to see why the folks at Barcelona-based Honest&Smile built this crazy contraption into a Moleskine notebook, but that doesn’t make it any less neat — after all, Doc Brown built a time machine into a DeLorean. When closed, it looks like any other overpriced book of blank paper. When opened, it reveals a kind of analog Instagram playground.
The Olloclip must be one of the most useful iPhoneography accessories around. It’s a tiny clip-on widget which adds three additional lenses to the iPhone: macro, wide-angle and fisheye.
And until now, the only thing it was really lacking was a telephoto – after all the more-or-less 35mm equivalent lens on the iPhone is already wide enough for most uses. Olloclip has fixed that with this new lens, and added another handy accessory in the box: A circular polarizer.
Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.
Bonzart’s Ampel is a cool-looking — and cheap — digital camera styled on the TLR (twin-lens-reflex) cameras of old. But the retro case design isn’t just a gimmick: the Ampel actually packs some great featurres into the old-fashioned shape, including a dedicated tilt-shift lens.
Pixter is an interesting idea, although one which is – possibly – doomed. Here’s the elevator pitch: Pixter is a for-pay Instagram.
Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.
Ever wish that there was a kind of Instagram for video? Not the sharing part – I still think that’s wrong for video – but the filters part. There are a metric frak-load of photo-processing apps for the iPhone and iPad, but precious few for grungifying your videos. Thankfully, that just changed. With an update and a complete redesign, VideoGrade is now an essential app for iOS videographers.
Gramatica is just about the nicest Instagram-browser app I have yet seen. It’s essential on the iPad mini, on which the official Instagram app looks hideous thanks to the mini’s refusal to display Retina assets. And on the iPhone it’s even better than the Instagram app, thanks to its full-width pictures and fantastic gestural controls.
