Instagram 2.0 Now Available: Live Filters, New Camera UI, Faster Engine

Instagram, the iPhone-only social network for sharing photos with your friends, has released a major new version of their app today, which reaches version 2.0 and adds a number of new features, updated interface design, and a new icon.

The most notable change in Instagram 2.0 is the implementation of live filters. In previous versions of Instagram, every time you took a new photo with the app’s dedicated camera UI you had to apply a filter after the photo was taken, and if the filter was not okay for the photo, you were obviously forced to go back to main screen and re-shoot. Having to retake a photo to make it play nice with a selected filter could lead to several problems – your favorite “moment” may be gone forever, and you’d end up with multiple shots to choose from. In Instagram 2.0, the camera screen has been completely re-imagined to accomodate live filters and tilt shift – meaning, you can see how a filtered photo will look like before you take it.

Thanks to iOS’ powerful live image editing and photo-taking functionalities, the developers have been able to develop a solution that lets you instantly see how filters will apply to your photos – no need to shoot and apply separately.

From this new camera view, you can scroll filters at the bottom, or play with a series of buttons along the top. These buttons let you snap a photo without borders, activate/disable flash, swap cameras, or tweak live tilt-shift. The latter option is particularly amazing when seen in action, as it updates the camera view in real-time with different types of tilt-shift as you tap on the screen.

Alongside being able to see how filters will look like before taking a photo, Instagram version 2.0 comes with four new effects (Amaro, Rise, Hudson, and Valencia). Users can still decide to take a photo without effects and apply them later (simply don’t tap on the filters icon in the toolbar), but from what I’ve seen so far, performances of this update on the latest iPhone hardware really make for a fast and smooth experience when playing with live filters. We tested the feature on an old iPhone 3GS and the transition between effects was very smooth on that device, too. The Instagram developers say the new filter engine is up to 200 time faster than before.

Since the day we launched, one core part of the app has remain largely unchanged: the camera. In the past, we’ve added filters & tilt-shift, but the base technology has never evolved. Today that all changes as we introduce a complete upgrade to Instagram’s camera with a brand new technology layer.

See the world through Instagram’s stunning effects before you even snap a photo. Simply select a filter, hold the camera up to the scene and see the world through Instagram’s visual effects. We’ve re-written your favorite Instagram filters to be over 200x faster so even after having taken a photo, switching between them takes no time at all.

The new Instagram is also geared towards giving users more control over how their photos are snapped, and shared with the world. Besides being able to remove borders and rotate a photo after it’s taken, photos are now saved at much higher resolution in a device’s library – photo size has been increased from 612x612 to 1936x1936 on the iPhone 4 (1536x1536 on the iPhone 3GS). This was one of the biggest complaints with the original Instagram, and the developers are surely on the right path to deliver an app that’s equally fast at sharing photos, and saving them at high quality.

As the service is now nearing 10 million users, it’s interesting to look back at my initial review of Instagram last year and see how much has changed. In spite of the new features introduced today – a refreshed interface, live filters, higher photo sizes – Instagram is still the same app that allows users to share photos with a new “social paradigm”. Instagram has reinvented the way photos can be “beautified” and shared on mobile devices to multiple social networks, ultimately building a social network on its own that’s now attracting millions of users and popular brands.

You can find Instagram 2.0 on the App Store.

Canon Announces AirPrint Support for PIXMA Printers

With a press release posted earlier today, Canon has announced initial support for Apple’s AirPrint technology in three PIXMA printers: the PIXMA MG8220, MG6220 and MG5320 Wireless Photo All-In-One will support iOS’ AirPrint with a firmware update. Canon has also announced that, going forward, AirPrint support will be enabled in most PIXMA printers.

Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging, today announced that the PIXMA MG8220, MG6220 and MG5320 Wireless Photo All-In-One inkjet photo printers will now support AirPrint1 wireless printing for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. AirPrint allows users to wirelessly print photos, emails, web pages and other documents without the need to install device drivers, saving time and making for a seamless user experience.

AirPrint will be supported by the majority of Canon PIXMA inkjet printers launched from this point forward. AirPrint works with iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPod touch (3rd generation and later) using iOS 4.2 or later.

Canon has launched a dedicated mini-site to better highlight the features of AirPrint and detail the necessary firmware update process. AirPrint was introduced back in November 2010 with iOS 4.2, allowing users to wirelessly print documents, photos and webpages from their iPhones and iPads. Apple had initially announced AirPrint would support any shared printer on OS X, but that feature was later removed from the public version of 10.6.5. AirPrint launched with third-party support from HP, which rolled out wireless printing support to 8 more devices earlier this summer.

Apple Releases First Final Cut Pro X Update, Free 30-Day Trial

As reported by Jim Dalrymple at The Loop, Apple is releasing the first update to Final Cut Pro X on the Mac App Store today, alongside a demo version so customers interested in switching to FCP X will be able to try out the new features for free. Following the much criticized launch of Final Cut Pro X in June – a major update to Apple’s video editing suite – the company posted an online FAQ detailing why some old features of Final Cut didn’t make it to the new version, promising that they would listen to users’ feedback and re-implement the most requested functionalities in order to provide video professionals with a complete and revolutionary suite for video editing.

According to The Loop, version 10.0.1 focuses on re-implementing the most requested features.

We got a lot of feedback from our professional users,” Richard Townhill, Apple’s senior director applications marketing, told The Loop. “We listened to the pros and have taken their top feature requests and put them in this update.

The new version includes Xsan support, rich XML import and export, and more. Macworld has a list of changes in this Final Cut Pro X update (such as “intelligent stem export from project timelines” with a new Roles feature, GPU-accelerated export, and full-screen mode in Lion), and Apple says more functionalities such as multicam editing and broadcast-quality video monitoring will be delivered through another update in 2012. At the moment of writing this the 10.0.1 update is still not available on the Mac App Store. Apple said that despite heavy criticism, they haven’t seen video professionals abandoning the Final Cut Pro X platform in the past months. To ease the transition process to FCP X, Apple made the old version available through tele-sales again. Today, Apple is also releasing a free demo version of FCP X:

We are giving people the opportunity to see for themselves how powerful, amazing and revolutionary Final Cut Pro is,” said Thornhill. “No app takes advantage of Lion and the Mac the way Final Cut Pro X does.

Macworld reports the free 30-day trial will be available from Apple’s website later today:

The large differences between Final Cut Pro X and its predecessor, Final Cut Studio, have put many editors off, making them wary of dropping $300 on a program that’s more rewrite than update. As such, Apple has decided to offer these editors an olive branch, and provide a free, fully-functional 30-day trial of the software, which should be available for download later on Tuesday from the company’s website. If you have Final Cut Studio installed, the FCPX trial can peacefully co-exist alongside it—no need to create a separate partition.

Final Cut Pro X is available at $299 on the Mac App Store. Read more

My Must-Have Mac Apps, 2011 Edition

One year after my “Must Have 25 Mac Apps” article, I believe it’s time to revisit that list of software I said I would install every time on a new Mac.

A lot of things have changed since September 2010. For one, Mac apps can now be distributed through the Mac App Store, which has proven to be a feasible and reliable platform for developers to showcase their apps to OS X users. The Mac App Store comes built into Snow Leopard since version 10.6.6, and over the past months we’ve taken a look at different numbers and stats showing how Apple’s youngest storefront is set to fundamentally revolutionize app distribution on desktop computers. But the Mac App Store’s release leads to another change happened in the last 12 months, and that’s Lion.

Originally previewed at the “Back to the Mac” event in October 2010, Lion was publicly released in late July after a round of betas that started becoming available to Mac developers since February. Lion has enabled Apple to bring new features to the Mac App Store such as delta updates for apps and in-app purchases, not to mention the fact that all new Macs sold since July 20 have Lion pre-installed, and thus the Mac App Store. At a developer level, Lion is allowing Objective-C coders and OS X designers to come up with new solutions that take advantage of Apple’s latest technologies such as natural scrolling, push notifications, popover controls, full-screen mode, and Versions. Lion has spawned a new breed of Mac software that it’s just starting to leave a sign in the average consumers’ minds, who are increasingly demanding and looking forward to applications that have been properly enhanced for Lion.

And last, there are new Macs in Apple’s line-up. Since September 2010, Apple has updated all its Mac models (except the Mac Pro) and discontinued the white MacBook, the most obvious victim of Apple’s new crown jewel – the MacBook Air. New Macs come with trackpads specifically geared towards Lion’ multi-touch support, and the new Sandy Bridge CPUs by Intel make the process of booting a Mac, and even switching between applications faster than ever.

In a way, the “September 2011” Apple is both identical and different from the company we were covering last year. But title changes and cloud strategies aside – how does the new Mac ecosystem affect the apps I listed on this site a year ago? Read more

Agenda 2.0 Gets Native, Elegant iPad Version

Back in June I reviewed App Savvy’s Agenda, an elegant and intuitive calendar app for the iPhone that was “powered by gestures”. Unlike Apple’s recent experimentations in UI design with interfaces resembling their real-life counterparts (Address Book, Lion’s iCal, the iPad’s Calendar), Agenda wanted to be an app that looked like your old “paper calendar”, in a way that wouldn’t feel awkward or “over-designed” on the iPhone’s screen. That made Agenda an easy-to-use application with the focus on beautiful typography, navigation, and “one hand usage”. Agenda can be used with single swipes to the left or right to switch between monthly, weekly, and daily views.

With a free 2.0 update released today, Agenda becomes a Universal app that runs natively on the iPad. I’ve been able to beta test it in the past weeks, and I’m impressed by how Agenda made the leap from the iPhone to the bigger screen of the iPad. Everything in Agenda 2.0 – navigation, views, event creation – benefits from the added pixels and updated interface, which takes advantage of the iPad’s landscape orientation to beautifully lay out year, month, week and day views with the same attention to simplicity and typography seen in version 1.0. On the iPad, you start in a day view with a sidebar, and scheduled events on the right. The bottom toolbar contains buttons to snap back to “today” in the sidebar’s scrollable list, jump to a specific day, or change the view to day/week/month/year. The day view’s sidebar automatically updates the translucent top header as you scroll back to previous months, and a search bar along the top lets you look up single events in your calendar. Agenda supports all calendar protocols integrated with iOS, and calendars are automatically imported from Apple’s Calendar app (you can choose which ones to enable, and the app works with no issues with iCloud).

Tapping on events in the day view will reveal a popover with additional details, whilst swiping vertically in this section will navigate between days. Similarly, tapping on days in the sidebar will scroll the right panel automatically. At the top of day view, Agenda displays a mini-calendar for the current month; tapping on it will bring you to the month view, which is fairly standard but gets the job done. Events can be given colored dots for the calendar they’ve been assigned to, and today is highlighted in red. Again, scrolling vertically in this view will automatically advance to the next months, and update the header at the top.

Agenda for iPad also offers a year view, which has to be scrolled horizontally, and provides some basic “heat map” functionality in that thanks to colored dots you can see at a glance which months are the busiest. Year view displays six months at a time – a clever choice that allows each panel to have bigger fonts for months and days. Tapping on a day in year view will jump back to day view.

My favorite feature of Agenda 2.0, however, is the week view on the iPad. See, when I use a calendar application, I like to know what’s going on this week. Week view allows me to instantly see my schedule for the week, and I love how Saturdays and Sundays (my non-work days) are smaller than regular week days.

I spoke to App Savvy’s Ken Yarmosh about Agenda 2.0, and he told me that, in a small way, the Mac influenced the design of Agenda for iPad. As I mentioned above, the iPad’s bigger screen makes for a more comfortable calendar experience and, personally, I think Agenda would be great as an alternative to iCal on my desktop. Agenda works with Apple’s standard EventKit framework for event creation, and the app is already running smoothly on iOS 5. I also asked Ken about the design decisions behind Agenda for iPad: unlike several calendar apps on the App Store, Agenda only works in landscape mode. Ken explained that, while designing the app for a different form factor, they had to look at how a regular calendar is used in real life, and found out that most “sizes” of a paper calendar are closer to the iPad’s landscape mode. I agree with Ken when he says that portrait views in calendar apps for the iPad are usually difficult to use and navigate. More importantly though, he confirmed my general feeling of “less swiping, more tapping” on the iPad version of Agenda – in designing a native experience for the iPad (and not a simple “port” of the iPhone experience) Ken and his team correctly assumed that the iPad implies different usage scenarios than the iPhone, and being forced to constantly swipe on the tablet’s large screen can be tiresome.

The new Agenda comes with a few more fixes and minor changes for the iPhone version, too. Agenda 2.0 is a delightful way to manage your calendars on the iPad – and app that focuses on content and an elegant presentation of events, weeks, and months. Agenda is currently on sale at $0.99, and you shouldn’t miss it.

Epic Games Brings Unreal Engine 3 To The Mac

Epic Games yesterday announced that the Unreal Engine 3 can now run on Macs with the arrival of the free Unreal Development Kit to OS X. Joystiq does note, however, that it arrives four years after Epic announced Gears of War and Unreal Tournament for OS X, but failed to deliver.

Every UDK game’s potential user base has increased dramatically yet again.

Unreal Engine 3 now supporting Macs comes after Epic introduced the Unreal Development Kit for iOS last year. Since then a number of iOS games build on the UDK have been released, including Epic Citadel (the beautiful tech demo of the UDK), Infinity Blade and Rage HD. LucasArts and Gameloft have also signed multi-year deals with Epic to produce games using the UDK.

[Epic Games via Joystiq]

Apple Releases Thunderbolt Display Firmware Update

Apple’s Thunderbolt Display started arriving to customers last week, and earlier today Apple changed the display’s shipping times to 3-5 days, signaling a clear change in retail and online availability. Apple has now released a firmware update for the Thunderbolt Display. The update requires OS X  10.6.8, or “10.7.1 or later”.

This update improves the stability of the Apple Thunderbolt Display.

The updater application will be installed in the Utilities folder inside the Application folder and will be launched automatically when you close this installer. Please follow the instructions in the updater application to complete the update process.

The Thunderbolt Display Firmware Update is available from Apple’s Downloads website now.

Leaked Photos Show “iPhone 4S” Device with A5 Chip, iPhone 4 Design

A photo discovered earlier today by PhoneArena on Chinese microblogging service Weibo seemed to “confirm” that the next-generation iPhone would indeed run a modified version of the A5 CPU first introduced by Apple in the iPad 2 last March. As usual with photo leaks, the image was blurry and the A5 logo on the integrated chip in the mainboard could have been easily faked with Photoshop. Several outlets, however, suggested that the photo could be real, albeit belonging to the rumored “iPhone 4S” device in the works, rather than the real, “all-new” next-generation iPhone 5. Comparisons of this morning’s photo with previously posted iPhone 4S/5 parts seemed to confirm the theory that the newly captured part was legit.

There’s been much controversy and speculation in recent months as to whether Apple will introduce a single iPhone 4-like update in the next weeks, a major redesign called “iPhone 5”, or both. Most recent rumors are claiming Apple will release two new iPhone models this Fall to target different market segments – namely, there’s a great opportunity for Apple in China and other pre-paid markets, where a cheaper, off-contract “iPhone 4S” could possibly sell very well and still appeal to consumers as a premium device. Apple executives have hinted at the pre-paid market before.

A new photo which seems to corroborate this morning’s alleged leaked has been published by MacPost, which claims it depicts the new “iPhone 4S” with an A5 chip and slightly updated battery. As many noted this morning, the battery unit in the allegedly leaked photos reports “1430 mAh”, instead of the iPhone 4’s 1420 mAh. MacPost’s follow-up picture shows a partially-assembled device displaying iTunes’ activation screen, as well as an iPhone 4-like white front panel. According to the website, this should confirm the “4S” nature of the device (that is, the “minor” upgrade – identified by many as N94 – and not the “real” iPhone 5), also because of the several components that are shown in the photo, and “leaked” on the Internet over the past months. Those components they mention were deemed as “iPhone 5 parts” at the time. Furthermore, the front panel’s speaker grille is heavily resembling of white iPhone 4 prototypes prior to the white iPhone 4’s public debut.

There’s still much confusion floating around Apple’s plans for the next iPhone(s), and it is worth noting the same A5-enabled, white, iPhone 4-like device was spotted back in April running on T-Mobile network. 9to5mac shares my personal theory in that if these photos are legit, they’re most likely to portray an early iPhone 4-like prototype for a next-generation iPhone, rather than a recent “final design” unit.

According to an article from The New York Times published last week, a “fairly different” iPhone 5 with better specs (A5 CPU, 8 MP camera) is just “weeks away”.