Instagram Launches Hyperlapse

Today, Instagram released Hyperlapse, an app for shooting smooth time-lapse videos — not to be confused with Microsoft's Hyperlapse from two weeks ago which also dealt with stabilizing time-lapse videos. Instagram's Hyperlapse does however appear to be a bit more complex than the time-lapse feature Apple added to the Camera app in iOS 8.

From Wired, on the inspiration behind Hyperlapse and how it reached Instagram:

Inspired by a demo in which he saw gyroscopes attached to cameras to de-blur their images, Karpenko had an aha moment: Smartphones didn’t have nearly enough power to replicate video-editing software, but they did have built-in gyroscopes. On a smartphone, instead of using power-hungry algorithms to model the camera’s movement, he could measure it directly. And he could funnel those measurements through a simpler algorithm that could map one frame to the next, giving the illusion that the camera was being held steady. He mocked up a simple demo, and filmed a dot on his wall, while making his hand shake. “The images in the test matched up almost exactly, and that’s when I knew this was doable,” Karpenko says.

Eventually the duo uploaded video of the app in action to Instagram’s internal message board, where it received the ultimate blessing: a single comment from Instagram co-founder and CEO, Kevin Systrom. It simply declared, “This is cool.” This, in turn, egged them on to present their project to the wider group, at the company’s first “pitch-a-thon” for new creative tools, held last January. (Many of Instagram’s new features are the result of that meeting, including the sliders that allow you to dial in the strength of each filter.)

The technology certainly seems impressive. I'm excited to try the app out and might even upload one of my attempts, if it's worth sharing.

Download Hyperlapse

The Best Example of Bad Design by Apple

Let's say for whatever reason, you decide to turn on Airplane Mode on your iPhone — maybe you're running low on battery or you're travelling out of country. Anyways, your iPhone is now disconnected and you decide to open an app that requires some form of connectivity to function. Let's take a simple example, Safari. You try to load up a website and then you're prompted with a dialogue box that says "Turn off Airplane Mode or Use Wi-Fi to Access Data" and your options are "OK" and "Settings". "OK" will dismiss the dialogue box and "Settings" will throw you into the settings app so you can turn off Airplane Mode or turn wi-fi on.

There are two problems here:

1) The settings button is fine, it does exactly what it's meant to do but, the problem lies with OK. To a normal person, OK would indicate giving permission — OK, turn off Airplane Mode so I can view this content, not OK, dismiss what you just told me and leave me having to do all the work myself. Somehow, OK needs to become something more obvious like cancel either by rewording the prompt or following the suggestion I'm going to make next...

2) The approach is all wrong, it feels like the type of approach Apple would take before iOS 7; before Control Center which is supposed to limit the number of times you visit settings for simple tasks like turning wi-fi on and off. So why are we still being yanked out of an app to do a simple task? At the very least, bring up Control Center as opposed to the settings app but, we can still do even better than that.

Instead of being confined to the basic utility of buttons, switches can be incorporated to simplify the process of turning certain settings on and off. Users are already familiar with switches and will definitely understand the meaning of Cancel. This approach is a rough idea I came up with and it may have some flaws. For example, it wouldn't make sense to just use Cancel as that will indicate no changes are applied so perhaps the inclusion of a "Done" button that only becomes clickable if changes are made would be more appropriate.

If you feel that complaining about something so simple is a bit of a stretch, try it for yourself. To this day, I still make the mistake of hitting OK accidentally, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about this issue here. Also, this isn't the only example of dialogue boxes with vague options and a tedious implementation for the user. Another example will result from having wi-fi turned off while using the Maps app. In the end, what it comes down to is detail. The smallest details are what add up to an outstanding experience and this, in my opinion is one detail Apple should take some time to address.