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Posts tagged with "iPhone 6s"

Apple Highlights 3D Touch in New iPhone 6s Ad

Apple aired a new iPhone 6s commercial today, focusing on the 3D Touch capabilities of the device and what the functionality brings with iOS 9.

Modelled after the first commercial for the iPhone 6s and carrying the same “The only thing that’s changed is everything” tagline, the ad highlights the peek and pop gestures of 3D Touch for apps like Mail, Messages, Maps, and Instagram. Jamie Foxx makes an appearance during a brief Apple Music segment, and Apple also showcases Home screen quick actions, Mail gestures, and peeking flight information.

It’s a fun, fast-paced ad in the style of the first one, and it does a good job at communicating the time savings granted by 3D Touch gestures. You can watch it below.

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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 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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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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Austin Mann’s iPhone 6s Camera Review in Switzerland

Each year, Austin Mann puts together the camera-focused iPhone review I want to read. This year is no different, and I was curious to see what he’d create this time given the camera improvements to the iPhone 6s.

I liked this bit about Live Photos:

I really appreciate the deeper story each of these tells — the sound of the cowbell, the flying dust under the drone, the steam rising from my Swiss hot chocolate. We take pictures to tell stories and share experiences with those around us, and Live Photos helps us do that in a way we simply haven’t before.

What I love about Live Photos is its ability to accomplish this, completely behind the scenes. Some of these Live Photos in this gallery were completely unintentional, which is the best part about it.

His entire review is full of videos, comparisons with the iPhone 6 Plus, and technical explanations than aren’t hard to understand and are well-illustrated. Recommended.

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How Does the iPhone 6s Camera Compare to Every Other iPhone Generation?

In the past eight years, each new advancement in iPhone camera technology has made dramatic improvements to image quality. The new 12-megapixel iPhone 6s iSight camera is no exception. With 50% more megapixels than the last four iPhone 8-megapixel models, the iPhone 6s boasts a number of key improvements including: improved auto-focus, local tone-mapping, noise reduction, and colour separation, with that fancy “deep trench isolation” technology Apple is raving about.

In this follow-up post to my previous iPhone comparisons, I present a 9 iPhone comparison from all iPhone versions taken with Camera+ including: the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and the new iPhone 6s, in a variety of real-life situations to test each iPhone camera’s capabilities.

Lisa Bettany’s annual iPhone camera comparison is always well worth a read. Make sure to tap on the examples for more details, and check out Lisa’s explanation of the photos.

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iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Opening Weekend Sales Hit a Record 13 Million

Apple announced this morning that the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus has sold more than 13 million units over its opening weekend. The new iPhone went on sale last Friday in the United States, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore, and the UK.

“Sales for iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus have been phenomenal, blowing past any previous first weekend sales results in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Customers’ feedback is incredible and they are loving 3D Touch and Live Photos, and we can’t wait to bring iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus to customers in even more countries on October 9.”

13 million units sold over the opening weekend is a new record for iPhone sales. Last year Apple sold 10 million units of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, whilst in 2013 Apple sold 9 million units of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. In fact, Apple has consistently beaten their opening weekend iPhone sales every single year.

Second Wave of iPhone 6s Launch Countries Announced

Apple also announced today that the second wave of iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus launch countries will get the device on October 9 and 10. Over those two days, the new iPhones will launch in 42 countries in this second wave, including Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain and Taiwan.

The full list of countries:

iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus will roll out worldwide to more than 40 additional countries and territories beginning October 9 including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Maldives, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan. On October 10, countries include Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

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Live Photos and Capturing Memories

Great take by MG Siegler on Live Photos:

You know the scene in almost every movie where a person is looking at an old picture of a loved one when suddenly it triggers their memory of the moment and we’re taken back to a live version of the scene? In a small way, that’s Live Photos. It’s hard to see right now because these iPhones with the functionality are brand new and so the memories are still fresh in our heads. But just imagine what these Live Photos will be like when you look at them in a year? Or ten years? They’ll be memories, captured in time.

See also: Jeremy Olson on capturing moments of a child’s life with Live Photos.

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Matthew Panzarino on the iPhone 6s and 3D Touch

TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino has written my favorite iPhone 6s review yet. He goes into detail on performance and camera improvements, but he also focuses on the productivity aspect of 3D Touch and why iOS 7’s design helped bring the feature to life.

This is one of the big things that 3D Touch does, it eases the fear of handling actionable items. It allows you to retain your context while adding something to your calendar, peeking at an email or sneaking a look at a link to see if you really want to read it.

Pressing lightly to ‘peek’ and pushing hard to ‘pop’ it into existence provides an escape hatch that eases your mind, and a new iOS 9 affordance injects a ‘back’ button at the top left corner of any screen you jump to. iOS 9’s new task manager, accessed by a firm press on the edge of the screen (or the standard double-tap of the home button) is also arranged in a much more contextually rich card format — a time-line of your jumping around through apps.

It’s not hard to imagine how apps will take advantage of 3D Touch, and Matthew gets it.

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