Best new apps of the week: Filters for iPhone and Periscope
Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past two weeks that we believe is a must-have download for your iPhone or iPad. These apps will always be from various categories, but they are chosen because our own staff members love it and have been using them daily. So here are this week’s picks! Enjoy!
Filters for iPhone
Help yourself to a huge variety of cool photo filters and effects in our App of the Week.
Are you the type of person who loves applying filters to your photos, but tired of having to get more effects through in-app purchases in almost every other photo editing app? Then our App of the Week, Filters for iPhone by Mike Rundle, is the perfect app for you.
Rundle is a UI designer who also happens to be able to program his own apps, and all of this shines through in the app when you see it in action. Filters has a sleek interface with a dark theme to help focus on the images you’re editing, and the colorful icons for each filter and toolset are easily recognizable, even without labels. The app is fast and responsive with intuitive controls for adjusting strength and intensity, and the menu transition animations are a nice touch. Overall, you can see the thought and care put into this app by the developer.
The biggest draw of Filters is not the design, however, it’s the fact that there are over 800 different filters and effects that are available in the app, and there are no additional in-app purchases to worry about. Yes, you read that right — over 800 filters to choose from, with no IAPs. While this may seem overwhelming, everything is laid out in categories and subcategories, and everything can be seen before applying thanks to the preview thumbnails. Each effect can also have the intensity adjusted with a slider, and multiple filters can be used on a single photo. Favorites can be saved for quick access later too.
Even though Filters is all about, well, filters, there are also some photo editing tools as well. Filters includes the basics that you normally expect, such as brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, and the like, but there are also five new tools: Shine, Luna, Intimidate, Color Boost, and Smart Fade. These tools are able to bring a new mood and tone to images that you aren’t able to get in other apps, and it can intelligently assess image color data to add drama, vibrancy, or just get the perfect retro look for your image.
We are always looking for great photography apps at AppAdvice, and Filters takes the cake this week. If you want a lot of variety without having to pay up for a dozen different filter packs, then Filters for iPhone is a must. You can get it on the iPhone App Store for $0.99, and that gets you all 800+ filters.
For a closer look at Filters for iPhone, make sure to check my full review.
Honorable Mention Periscope
Live stream your life to your Twitter friends in Periscope.
Feel like streaming your daily life activities to your Twitter followers? Then you should check out our Honorable Mention this week, which is the newly rebranded Periscope from Twitter.
For those who are unaware, Periscope is a rival to another streaming app that launched recently, Meerkat. However, there are some key differences between the two. First, Periscope allows users to share their stream with all of their Twitter followers or just the ones who are already using Periscope. Another difference is the fact that Periscope allows you to limit your broadcast to select people.
During broadcasts, chats are kept inside the stream, rather than spamming your Twitter followers. Periscope also gamifies live streaming by allowing viewers to send hearts to streams, which can get you a higher spot on the Most Loved list.
Since Periscope is now owned by Twitter, you can use the social graph to find users to follow on Periscope based on your Twitter account. Notifications can be received whenever someone you follow starts streaming. As far as discoverability goes, there are suggestions on what streams to watch and people to follow. And when you decide to start streaming, you can toggle app access to the camera, microphone, or location before your stream goes live, which is nice.
The best feature of Periscope over Meerkat, though, is the fact that Periscope has a replay ability. This means that users can save their video streams to be replayed up to 24 hours later. So even if someone misses the stream, they can watch the video after it has ended if the streamer saved it.
It seems that live streaming is making a comeback, and we are eager to give it a shot here at AppAdvice. If you want to stream your interesting activities to others, then make sure to give Periscope a try. You can find it on the iPhone App Store for free.
For more about Periscope, don’t miss our original article.