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Amazing Looksery app changes your face in real time
Sometimes the capabilities in our iPhones amazes me. Looksery takes real-time video from your iPhone camera and detects your face's geometry. It then overlays a number of effects, some creepy, so you can send spooky pics or wacky videos to your friends. It works surprisingly well and is here just in time for Halloween. Looksery couldn't be easier to use. Just lift the phone up, look into the camera and tap on the screen if you don't see the red geometry lines detailing your face's contours. From there you can choose a number of "filters" by swiping through the choices below the image area, much like Instagram. But these filters move with your head. Several are eye color replacements, which are freaky if you have dark brown eyes like mine. Seeing my eyes in purple was a strange experience. The real-time rendering of these effects is truly impressive. One of the creators of Looksery also pointed out to me that the app does some creative filtering, smoothing wrinkles and generally making you look better. I woke up disheveled and with bags under my eyes and the app did make me look a little less worn for wear. You can also thin down your face in a still photo, just to see what that's like. There are a couple of truly creepy filters, however, like the flaming skull, X-ray and Monster, complete with scary sound effect. There's also a couple of 3D characters, which you can mostly puppet by moving your head, mouth and even eyebrows. And then there's a Lawnmower Man type polygon face that is a lot of fun. Oh, you can also make your face thin, fat or add a big chin. Like I said, it's pretty fun. Looksery can pull from your still photos, but obviously it's designed for faces and is a lot more fun in real time. There are a number of still photo filters, all pretty pedestrian. In photo mode you can also slim down your face, but that's about it. The app can also share video clips, which is where the app will blow minds. Send a flaming skull greeting, or send a creepy video that screams, it's all up to you! Of course Looksery videos support the usual sharing suspects: Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Messages, Email, and you can save to your photos. Twitter is only available for still photos. There's a messenger service, but I didn't try that as you have to sign up with your phone number. My bet is that won't take off for a lot of users. I found Looksery a lot of fun and it's free, so give it a try. According to TechCrunch the company is working on partnering with other companies, so maybe you'll find this tech baked into whatever selfie app you're currently using. Until then, have fun sending spooky videos this month!
Glitch Wizard is a fun way to make glitchy images and animation on your iPhone
Glitch Wizard creates animated or still images based on a series of pre-set "glitches" you can apply to your photos. You've possibly seen "glitch art" popping up around the web lately, with flickering GIFs of colorful digital weirdness warping ordinary photos. While they may be a passing fad like the Harlem Shake, they require a bit of work to create in a program like Photoshop. Enter Glitch Wizard, which is a simple but polished app that takes your photos and adds glitches and allows some basic animation of those glitches as you sequence the effects you add to the photos. The app is nicely designed with three icons at the bottom on launch: the standard camera icon at the bottom of the screen to either take a picture or use one from your photos. The app opens with a list of featured glitch artwork, which I assume is curated by the folks who make the app. You can get to these later by tapping the star icon. I found this interesting on first launch as a sort of example of what the app can do, but ignored it later. Then there's a grid of the glitches you've saved when you tap the grid of squares icon. To create glitches, grab a photo and you're taken to a composition interface, with an area showing each glitch, a playback button, settings and a series of effects each categorized into four groups. I won't go into each group of effects, as part of the fun of Glitch Wizard is seeing what each one does (and it can be wildly different depending on the image you start with). Suffice it to say there are a lot of options for making truly wild images and animations. Some effects allow you to tweak them, but most are simply applied and can be a bit random, as is the nature of glitch art. Also, you can keep adding effects to further glitch your images. The progression is often really fun to see animated. What I enjoyed was playing around with the effects, then seeing how progressing them would make an animation smoother or weirder. In all, it's just a lot of fun. While I'd like more editing options I realize there's little here I couldn't do in Photoshop with filters. But that's not the point -- this is designed to be quick and fun. You can delete individual frames, but I couldn't find a way to re-order them. You can also change the speed from slow to medium to fast, and set the animation to ping-pong back and forth or just loop. Once you're done you have a variety of sharing options, which I found interesting in their end results. On Twitter, for example, you can post a "native GIF" aka a GIF that Twitter has tuned for consumption on Twitter (and is no longer really a GIF). Although Twitter supports animated GIFs, I found it was easier to share them via this app than pulling them from my camera roll because Glitch Wizard doesn't actually save GIFs to your camera roll. Moving on, Instagram and Facebook posts are converted to videos. The thing about glitches and web video, however, is that compression relies upon sameness from frame to frame (generally speaking). My glitches looked really fuzzy if they were really wacky glitchy GIFs to start with. This isn't Glitch Wizard's fault, and frankly I appreciate the fact that it creates a video versus posting some lame link to a page that will inevitably break years later. Kudos on the sharing options for Glitch Wizard, as it's one of the best models I've ever seen in an app. Too bad Facebook compresses them so horribly. I found Instagram posts to have fewer artifacts and hence more clarity. Yes, you can save your creations to your camera roll, among other options (like tumblr, although one of my GIFs didn't post as animated when I tested it, so this could be a buggy area). My only complaint here is it's too easy to lose your creation. If you don't save to your glitches in the app or to your camera roll, however, your creations are lost forever. Also, it's a little odd that the app doesn't actually save a GIF to your camera roll, but rather an .m4v file. If you pull this onto your Mac you'll have to use another application to convert to GIF. If you want the GIF itself, the only option is to email it to yourself. Glitch Wizard is a simple but fun app that creates crazy glitched artwork from your photos. That's really all there is to it, although it's wrapped up in a great design and works very well. It's currently on sale but I'd recommend it at the full US$1.99 if you enjoy making glitch art.
Downloads for iOS is a decent file manager with limitations
Downloads - File Downloader & Manager is, as the name suggests, a universal app for iPhone and iPad that can download various types of files like documents, images, ZIP and RAR files. The app can then display certain (but not all) files you've downloaded using its built-in viewer. It's free in the App Store, but a paid in-app purchase for US$0.99 will unlock unlimited downloads. As far as first impressions go, the design of Downloads doesn't make a very good one. It is a very strange mixture of iOS 7's stock UI, an iOS 6-inspired UI and a custom one. I get the jarring feeling of using multiple apps within one, but no, this is actually the way the designers chose to design it. The app has a built-in web browser so if you download files quite often, you might spend more time in Downloads than in Safari. If you come across a file the app can download, such as a PDF, just tap it once to bring up your menu of options. The first option is aptly a "Download" button, followed by the ability to copy the link, send it via email or SMS or open it in Safari. If you download the file, it will go into the Downloads tab just while it's downloading then migrate once more to the Files tab when complete. I chose a random 0.18 MB PDF through Google search and the download time was almost instantaneous. It's not a large file size for the app to justifiably take too long, but the speed of the app is still very decent. The document viewer supports .pdf, .xls, .csv, .doc, .txt, .xml, .rtf, .ppt, .gif, .png, .jpeg, .jpg and .bmp file formats -- mostly all of the basics. The viewer presented thumbnails for each page of the PDF I opened at the bottom, plus a grid view option at the top and other buttons to print, email or bookmark. The viewer switches over to the iOS 6 UI, but offers all the essentials. Also worth noting is that aside from the document viewer and ZIP/RAR extraction, you have to open any other file in a third-party app that supports it. I then searched for something a bit more intensive to throw at the app. When I tried to download my second file, Downloads greeted me with a very unwelcome message stating that I had used up all my downloads and to buy the full version for $0.99 to download anything else. This is disappointing. It's not that $0.99 is expensive, because it's not. It's the principle of calling an app free when it's really just more of single free chip given out at a wholesale store in a weak attempt to convince you to buy the entire bag of chips. The app with the full benefits of being able to download as many files as you want is actually around a buck. Downloads - File Downloader & Manager seems mostly like a decent app for downloading and opening various documents, images and some other files. The user interface is strange but not unintuitive, and both the download speed and document viewer are perfectly adequate. Be prepared to pay $0.99 if you want to use Downloads more than once though. Also, power users who need a more advanced file manager may still want to consider looking elsewhere.
Vibrance Photo Filter Creator doesn't shine so brightly
Vibrance is an app for iOS (compatible with all devices running iOS 4.3 and later) that lets you create your own photo filters using a combination of colors, contrast, opacity and a few other tools. It's free, but for the app to be at all useful to anyone requires an upgrade to Vibrance Premium currently available for US$0.99. When you open the app for the first time, it asks if you want to view a help tutorial. I wouldn't skip this because the UI is mediocre at best so you're better off learning the basics with a guide. After you're finished with the tutorial, it's time to start exploring the free version of the app. At the top is the image you're currently editing, which in the free version of the app is a sample image of a woman sitting in a field. Here's the catch: unless you upgrade the app to Vibrance Premium, that's the only image available for edit. Photo import -- a basic feature in any photo editing app -- requires a paid upgrade. Now that you've come to the realization that the free version of Vibrance is really more of a demo than a functional app, it's at least worth toying around with for a bit. Underneath the photo is an opacity slider which adjusts the transparency of the filter overlaying the photo. Slide all the way to the left and you have your original photo. All the way to the right and you have the filter applied in full effect. This comes in handy as sometimes the colors are a bit too strong. Toward the bottom is where you create your filter. The app presents a full color wheel (or literally a color rectangle in this case) plus some preset colors to choose from, but they're so small to tap in the iPhone app that you're better off ignoring them. It's a bit easier in the iPad app which is just a scaled up version. The gradient bar is where you add the colors you select to blend them together and create the filter. In my experience, it wasn't easy picking a combination of colors that looked decent for the photo even when I turned down the opacity. I resorted to using my favorite feature in Vibrance, the Shuffle button floating at the top right. When enabled, shake your iPhone or iPad to apply a randomly generated filter and most of them do look pretty good. I suppose it's also worth mentioning the app includes some finer controls for saturation, contrast, brightness and hue but with the inability to import your own photos for free, these don't matter very much. What Vibrance comes down to is this: to apply and save professional pre-made filters or create your own for your own photos, upgrading to Vibrance Premium for $0.99 is your only option. For free, Vibrance is, quite frankly, useless. That said, if you are going to spend money, you're better off with apps like Afterlight ($0.99) or Camera+ ($1.99) which have far more features for perfecting your photos and include a multitude of adjustable filters, too. Compared to these, Vibrance isn't all that vibrant. UPDATE 8/20/14: The developer has reached out after this review was published to announce that version 1.0.2 of Vibrance is now live in the App Store and adds photo importing to the free version of the app, dramatically improving its usability. That's one negative now effectively null and void.
Hellow! is like Snapchat for your more precious moments
Hellow! is a free photo-sharing app for iOS that in practice is somewhat similar to Snapchat, but still clearly serves a different purpose. Photos don't disappear until you manually delete them, and the ability to schedule when and where to send them means planning a thoughtful picture to share ahead of time is far more plausible. These additional features for photo management make it less geared for casual use and more toward meaningful use. Hellow! works on all iOS devices using iOS 7.0 or above. The name of the app puts it at somewhat of a disadvantage right off the bat because search engines think you meant to type "hello." Finding the app using the link above or through the website are your best bets. That said, once you've actually installed the app, the experience gets better. On the main screen, there are three tabs at the top: one to display Hellows sent to you, one for Hellows you've scheduled to send and one for Hellows you already sent. The sender's username, date and location accompanies each photo - the latter will oddly just say "Anywhere :)" if the sender didn't attach the location. Opening any Hellow brings up options to download or delete it, plus a comment box where everyone who received the Hellow can post comments. The chat bubble icon on the top left of the main screen opens up an activity pane as well where everyone's likes and comments are collectively shown. The concept here is that a single photo is enough to spark a conversation between either two people or a group of people, and it's actually quite nice. I can see how sending a photo from vacation to a group of friends, for example, might get a decent amount of engagement on Hellow! then friends can reply with a photo of what they're up to. The app really pushes for the photo-sharing aspect though. In fact as soon as you open Hellow! the camera will slide in from the bottom even if you have new messages to view. Thankfully, there is an option in the settings to turn this off. To send a Hellow, either tap the camera icon at the bottom of the screen or make use of it automatically after startup. Snap a photo, enter in an optional message up to 140 characters and pick contacts to send it to. This is the part for me where the app really shines. Once you choose contacts to send your photo to, the app lets you choose when you want to send it or where you want to send it from. Schedule to send a Hellow immediately, as soon as in one hour, a month from now or at any date you choose in the future. If you're more interested in the where than the when, set up the Hellow to send when you're at a specific location. This feature is extremely clever and makes the app simultaneously more fun and more useful. The app even allows you to send Hellows to yourself, which could come in handy as somewhat of a photo reminder service. While Hellow! comes across as a great, feature-packed app for sharing and commenting on meaningful photos with friends, it's an app that requires you to already have friends signed up for it to be at all useful. Still, if you're a trendsetter and don't mind giving this free app a shot, definitely try saying hello to Hellow!
