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Wallgram: Convert Instagram shots into iOS 7 parallax wallpaper
Are you at a loss for wallpapers to decorate your lock and home screens? Wallgram (US$1.99) is a new app that resolves that problem by letting you convert any Instagram photo -- your own included -- into attractive and functional iOS 7 parallax wallpaper. The app, from developer Capable Bits, is rather simple, but does a really good job of preparing those photos for life as wallpaper. After launching Wallgram, you're greeted with a simple UI and asked to let Wallgram have access to your Instagram account. Once that's done, a "Home" button displays the timeline of Instagram photos from those people you follow; a "My Photos" button does the same for your Instagram images; and you can also tap an "Explore" button to view a feed of popular Instagrams. Regardless of how you discover the picture you want to turn into wallpaper, you just tap a large green button emblazoned with a white plus sign and the image is "awesomized" and added to your camera roll. What does "awesomization" entail? Basically, it takes the outer fringes of the photo and blurs them while keeping the center of the image quite sharp. At this point, you can just go to your cameral roll, tap on the image, tap the share button and select Use as Wallpaper. Just move the image so that it looks the best to you -- in most cases, this will be with the sharp portion of the image in the center of your iPhone screen and the top and bottom blurred -- and tap the Set button to save the image as your home screen, your lock screen or both. If there's one complaint I have about the "awesomization" process, it's that I wish that the blur was adjustable. The transition between blurred and non-blurred photo seems a bit abrupt, and I'd like to see the ability to adjust that transition as well as what parts of the image are blurred or not. But for the most part, Wallgram does exactly what it's supposed to do -- let you convert Instagram photos to iOS 7 parallax-view iPhone wallpaper in as few steps as possible. When you consider that you have an almost endless supply of wallpaper images to choose from each day from Instagram, that $1.99 price tag seems like a heck of a deal. Those wallpapers can theoretically be shared via Twitter, Facebook and email -- I say "theoretically" because the sharing features were not working in the version I downloaded for review. Wallgram requires iOS 7, and is optimized for iPhone 5.
