Live GIF Lets You Generate Animated GIFs From the iPhone 6s’ Live Photos

Live Photos are one of the best features of the iPhone 6s. While not revolutionary from a technical perspective (they’re video files associated with an image), the simple and natural implementation of Live Photos is breeding a new type of medium – the moving photo that comes alive under your touch. Harry Potter-esque in their effect and delightfully blended with 3D Touch, I genuinely believe that Live Photos make for one of the best demos of a new iPhone in years.

There’s one caveat with sharing Live Photos, though: at least for now, unless you’re sharing with someone who has an iPhone or unless the app you’re using is able to convert Live Photos on the fly, there isn’t a way to export Live Photos to GIF or movie formats from Apple’s Photos and share the result with the world. This is what Live GIF, a new $1.99 app released today by Priime, wants to offer a solution for.

Live GIF launches to a screen that automatically filters your photo library to only show Live Photos in a grid. You can press firmly on a Live Photo to peek at the video, or you can tap on one to start the conversion process, which typically lasts a couple of seconds. When done, the app will show an animated GIF (without audio, of course) with two buttons to share as GIF or share as video. In both cases, you’ll be shown the system share sheet so you can send the converted file to any app or extension you want. Keep in mind that GIFs are saved with looping, while videos are saved without looping and include audio.

And that’s all Live GIF does. In my tests, the app never failed to generate GIFs and videos for my Live Photos, which I was able to share via iMessage, Slack, and upload elsewhere with other apps. Live GIF provides an important missing functionality for iOS 9.0 and the current version of Live Photos – and it can be especially useful if you’re planning to share Live Photos on the web or with friends who don’t have iPhones.

Live GIF is available at $1.99 on the App Store.

Tweetbot 4.0.2 Lets You Swipe Safari View Controller Away→

Well, that was fast.

A few hours after the release of Tweetbot 4.0.1 with 3D Touch, Tapbots has released version 4.0.2 of the app, which adds a swipeable Safari View Controller.

Thanks to a workaround by Paul Haddad, you can now dismiss Safari View Controller with swipe from anywhere along the left edge of the screen – on both the iPhone and iPad. The gesture works surprisingly well despite its non-standard behavior, and it fixes one major annoyance of Safari View Controller on iOS 9.

I hope that more apps consider this, as it combines the comfort of Tweetbot’s old web view with the benefits of Safari View Controller.

Update: Also in this release, you can set Safari View Controller to open in Safari Reader mode automatically for every webpage (if Reader is available). I previously wrote about the feature here, and it works well for Tweetbot if you primarily open articles to read in-app. Very nice.

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Raising $40k for Hours Cloud with a Private Crowdfunding Campaign→

Fascinating (and successful) experiment by Jeremy Olson and his team, who ran a private crowdfunding campaign to sustain the development of Hours Cloud – a web version of the excellent iOS app:

Despite the evidence against the idea, we tried it anyway and I am happy to report that the campaign has so far blown away our expectations.

We have shared the campaign privately with only 16,000 newsletter subscribers over the past few weeks and up to today it has already generated $38,428.00 from 378 backers — an average of $101.66 per backer.

It might not be Pebble but remember that this was a completely private campaign — no press and no virality potential. I’ll be watching results now that the campaign is public and will post an update once we have those numbers.

His post has a lot of interesting details on how and why they approached potential business customers with a private campaign, which is now open here.

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Apple Opens @AppleMusicHelp Twitter Account to Answer Support Questions→

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Apple is continuing to expand its presence on social media services, today launching a brand new @AppleMusicHelp Twitter account to answer queries and support questions live over Twitter related to its Apple Music service. The account is manned each day of the week from 6 AM – 8 PM Pacific Time. Apple representatives will watch the account’s mentions timeline and try to help resolve people’s problems.

Good to see Apple valuing Twitter as a fast and efficient support system. There’s something to be said about the simplicity of asking a support question via Twitter versus opening a ticket or sending an email.

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Apple Details Wi-Fi Assist Feature of iOS 9→

With a support document (via Dan Moren at Six Colors), Apple has detailed the Wi-Fi Assist feature of iOS 9, which automatically switches to cellular data if a Wi-Fi connection is performing poorly. Some of the interesting tidbits:

Wi-Fi Assist will not automatically switch to cellular if you’re data roaming.

Wi-Fi Assist only works when you have apps running in the foreground and doesn’t activate with background downloading of content.

Wi-Fi Assist doesn’t activate with some third-party apps that stream audio or video, or download attachments, like an email app, as they might use large amounts of data.

Wi-Fi Assist received a bit of criticism when iOS 9 launched as some users couldn’t figure out why their cellular data usage increased. I’m glad that Apple has shared more details on the subject, though I still think it should be off by default.

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Tweetbot 4 Adds 3D Touch Support on iPhone 6s

Released earlier this month, Tweetbot 4 marked an important comeback for Tapbots. After years of stagnation, the iPad app received a fantastic update with a new design and column view, while the iPhone app continued refining the foundation of Tweetbot 3 with power user features and various visual tweaks.

Among changes, however, Tweetbot 4 didn’t launch with 3D Touch integration on the iPhone 6s – a choice motivated by developed Paul Haddad with an understandable desire to test the new input method on an actual device first. Today, Tapbots has released Tweetbot 4.0.1, which brings support for 3D Touch in the form of Home screen shortcuts and peek & pop gestures inside the app.

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Connected: The Confidence to Go Gold→

This week, Federico butchers many languages and uses a smaller phone, Myke orders a new iMac and Stephen gets upset about hard drives.

Also on this week’s Connected, my first impressions of the iPhone 6s and 3D Touch. You can listen here.

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The Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook’s iOS App→

Nick Heer, commenting on Facebook’s battery usage on iOS in response to a piece by Matt Galligan:

Make no mistake: this is user-hostile. Facebook is actively creating channels to continue refreshing their app in the background when the user has explicitly stated that they do not want it to. Ironically, the best way to reduce the battery and data consumption of the Facebook app in the background is to switch Background App Refresh back on. Better still, remove the Facebook app from your phone, and perhaps replace it with Paper (US store only).

Every time I take a look at a friend’s iPhone, Facebook is the app with the highest amount of battery usage in the background – even with Background App Refresh turned off. This has been going on for years, and instead of fixing the issue, it does seem like Facebook is always coming up with new ways to circumvent user control and consume more energy.

The fact that a company the size of Facebook can’t optimize energy consumption of their iOS app is simply ridiculous. If they can but don’t want to (because of processes they want to run in the background, constant notifications, etc.) – well, that’s even worse.

My solution has been the same for the past couple of years: never install the Facebook app, and always access Facebook from Safari.

Update: With iOS 9’s improved energy consumption stats, it’s easier to guess one of the various tricks Facebook may be employing to stay active in the background and drain battery. On my girlfriend’s iPhone, for instance, iOS 9 reports 5 hours of on-screen usage for the last 7 days, and another 11 hours of background audio usage with Background App Refresh turned off.

My guess is that Facebook is hijacking audio sessions on iOS by keeping silent audio in the background whenever a video plays in the app. And because, by default, videos on Facebook auto-play on both Wi-Fi and Cellular and few people ever bother to turn it off, that means there’s a high chance the Facebook app will always find a way to play a video, keep audio in the background, and consume energy to perform background tasks. I’m not alone in noticing the mysterious “Facebook audio” background consumption, and video auto-play seems to me the most likely explanation at this point. I don’t know if turning off auto-play may fix the problem, but I’d recommend doing that anyway to save data.

I wonder if Apple should consider additional battery controls to take action against shady practices like invisible background audio. What Facebook is doing shows a deep lack of respect for iOS users. I continue to recommend using Safari instead.

Update 10/15: In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Facebook confirmed they’re aware of an issue causing battery draining for users, and they’re working on a “fix”. Facebook didn’t provide any additional details on the nature of the issue.

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A Level Deeper→

MG Siegler, writing on 3D Touch and the iPhone 6s:

There’s been a lot of talk in the past couple of years about the great “un-bundling” of apps. That is, big, bloated apps that spin off certain features into their own apps. For some massive services, like Facebook, this makes sense. For the vast majority of apps, this makes no sense. It’s hard enough to get people to download one app, let alone two or three. Instead, what these developers should do is utilize 3D Touch to create one-touch access to certain functionality. Brilliant OS-level move by Apple.

In the few days I’ve spent with the 6s so far – I’m moving to a 6s Plus this weekend – this is exactly what I’ve noticed, too. 3D Touch quick actions on the Home screen give developers a chance to unbundle their app features and navigation points, exposing them to users in a new, convenient way.

A good example of this is Apple’s Photos app: if you 3D Touch the icon, you get a menu that, among other options, contains a ‘One Year Ago’ shortcut. The ability to view photos from the same day in the past has been explored as a standalone app concept in a variety of ways (see: Photo Flashback or Timehop). In Apple’s Photos, this isn’t even a proper screen – it’s a search filter. It could be easily missed by users, but its utility is clear (especially if combined with Live Photos a year from now). 3D Touch brings fast access to that feature without needing a separate app. In this sense, 3D Touch as an interface for the deep link has potential, and I’m curious to see how developers will further explore it.

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