How Instagram Lite differs from regular Instagram

Instagram Lite differs from regular Instagram in more ways than just the icon.

First, Instagram Lite weighs only 2MB compared to 30MB for regular Instagram. The service specifically hired a team of developers from Tel Aviv who managed to reduce the space the app takes up on your device while retaining most of the features.

Secondly, Instagram Lite has been sharpened to work with low-speed Internet connections. Most likely, this was achieved at the expense of lower resource consumption, because Instagram Lite is deprived of some features. For example, it does not support the night theme and not AR masks.

However, in the foreseeable future, the developers promise to add the missing features. In any case, the night theme in Instagram Lite will definitely appear. According to Instagram representatives, it will be at least “a black background with gray text for those users who prefer muted tones”.

But nothing is known about AR masks. Apparently, this element is quite resource-intensive and not only consumes more traffic, but also requires more processing power from the device on which it runs. And since Instagram Lite is primarily focused on weak devices and on countries where Internet speeds are quite low, most likely, it is not worth waiting for masks to appear in the light version.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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Here it is, the competitor YouTube, in all its glory, decided to compete not only on the computer Internet, but also on the mobile Internet. Recently, Vimeo released a client for the Android operating system, which, although it has an essence similar to the client YouTube has long been tied, but still seriously different, for which it is not a sin to thank the developers. First of all Vimeo meets unusual for Android design, as if it was taken from iOS. Launching the application first of all we are asked to log in, and if you still don’t have a Vimeo account, you can register on the spot, and at the same time you can choose the package you need: basic or “Plus”. The latter obviously has more functionality. If you don’t want to bother with any registration and stuff like that you may start using Vimeo service at once, but with very reduced functionality.

Package “Plus” is paid and it is designed for inveterate “downloaders” of video both from the Internet and in its expanses.

After logging in we are greeted by the main menu. In the upper bar we see a nice inscription “Vimeo”, it does not bear any functionality, it is followed by a key in the form of a plus, after clicking on it, we accidentally provoked to buy a package of “Plus”. The gear will send us to the account menu, where you can see your personal Vimeo usage statistics and set an avatar. The last key in the top bar is the Vimeo video search. The main menu itself consists of a 3×3 grid. The Camera menu item opens the video recording on the smartphone camera, the recording is made not by the standard application, but by the same Vimeo, the quality of the recording itself depends on the capability of your camera, in my case the camera easily shot video in 720p. It is possible to shoot until all the memory of the smartphone is full. In the bottom bar we have just a button Upload It, which will give us a choice to upload video from smartphone memory or record a new video and upload it to the internet.

Camera Roll is a gallery of all the videos recorded on the device, from here you can view, share in Vimeo and delete the clips. Playback files from the gallery, as well as all Vimeo videos in the player of the same program. It’s convenient – you do not have to wait for the launch of a third-party player.

Videos uploaded by users in Vimeo can be found in Featured, it’s all sorted by category, entering a category you choose videos from that category, no sorting was found and it’s not possible to find out the method of sorting videos, it must be the developers’ way.

When playing, the top of the video itself with the main functions (pause, rewind, add to your list of favorites and to the list to watch later). Below the video, you can see information about it, its author and the functions of sharing, commenting, adding to the album or channel, like in YouTube, then the list of “liked” users and a link to the authors of the video.

My Videos is a list of the videos you’ve uploaded to the web, so you can manage them from here.

In Likes and Watch Later are videos that you’ve marked as liked and videos to watch later, respectively.

Stats will gather all the statistics about you on views, likes and postings of all the videos you’ve watched, comments left, geolocation, and provide basic stats data.

Such a long word as Subscriptions means “subscriptions” in English. Here you can view your subscriptions to Vimeo channels and watch streams of those channels.

Vimeo is an excellent client for watching and sharing videos – it’s a serious competitor to the popular YouTube, in some ways worse and in some ways better, at least in design. Vimeo is more convenient and intuitive to work with channels, but YouTube subscriptions are more convenient, and the latter has orders of magnitude more uploaded videos. Looking at this Vimeo application, I only wish that this system would develop further and be as convenient to use as YouTube.

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500px has long been known and loved by a huge number of professional photographers, amateurs, and people who simply care about photography. 500px has been popular for a long time, but the mobile version was released just recently. About a month ago, the official 500px app for iPad appeared.

Considering that iPhone and iPod Touch owners did not get the official app, there is nothing strange in the fact that third-party developers took up this omission. French developers Pulpfingers are already quite famous, thanks to the excellent Photopular app for Flickr, and now it’s turn to the 500px service, so the ISO500 app was born.

The application is oriented first of all on the content consumption, so the main emphasis is put directly on the viewing of images. It is not necessary to have a 500px account in order to use the application, but if you want to use all the features of ISO500 it is better to have an account.

The app aims to be used by photographers and people close to photography, so the look of the app is top notch. It is nice and easy to use. There are no settings in ISO500, all you have to do is to provide your 500px account details and if you want to share interesting photos with your friends, your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Almost all of the controls in the app are centered on a small wheel located at the bottom of the app. This control is reminiscent of a camera’s mode selector wheel. You will use it to select tabs such as view your photos, choose an editorial, popular photos, favorites, and more.

The ISO500 allows you to view photos of your friends, a list reminiscent of a phone book. There is also a tab containing all the photos taken by your friends. You can add the photos you are viewing to your favorites and vote for or against the photo.

Of course, ISO500 works in both portrait and landscape mode, so viewing photos is convenient. If you want, you can hide elements of the interface while viewing images, so that nothing distracts you from viewing.

Unfortunately, the functionality of the ISO500 app does not reach the capabilities of 500px for iPad, let alone the features available on the 500px website.

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Foursquare is a popular social network with geo-positioning function. To put it simply, you can use it to mark your current location on the map (do the same “check-in”) and see where your friends and acquaintances are. Just think how convenient it is. For example, if you find yourself in the city center and suddenly get bored, you open foursquare and look at the map, and it turns out that your friend is sitting in the nearby square, and your friend is also sitting in the cafe across the street.

However, this is not the only advantage of foursquare, and probably not even the main one. The main thing – all sorts of bonuses in the form of free services and discounts for checks in cafes, stores and other places that benefit from mentioning the check in your diaries and your Facebook. After all, every such check is a kind of advertising coupled with a recommendation, and companies are willing to pay for it. Garmin hurries to join this international trend and is ready to reward for the checks in their stores.

Well, then it’s easy – press the “check-in” button whenever and wherever you want and get your reward points!

Perhaps the people at the company did not fully understand how successful their service was in balancing the usefulness and gaming component. After all, both before and after Foursquare, there were many applications where users had to leave reviews for different places: cafes, restaurants, stores, cinemas and so on. But they didn’t. At least not in the amount that Foursquare did around the world. And this is also important. The service became popular not only in the States, but also in other countries, where previously such applications could not achieve audience growth and, as a result, a normal volume of reviews, making any such service attractive to a new audience.

Foursquare was able to do this easily and effortlessly, largely due to the competitive nature of the service. Foursquare introduced the concept of “check-ins” and “mayorships” and added a spirit of excitement and struggle to the seemingly completely unplayable sphere. People were chequing at new places and writing reviews on them, chequing daily at work, in movie theaters, and everywhere else they could in order to gain the status of “mayor” of that place. On trips and travels, chequered at popular places, and thus visited them, to rack up medals showing: “yes, you did good, you’ve been to this city – hold the award.” A large part of Foursquare’s popularity was built on this, but one day the developers took and ruined what they themselves had created. In July 2014, Foursquare updated the site and at the same time brought all the check-ins, mayorships, and other “gaming” stuff into a separate app, Swarm. Whereas Foursquare itself remains a program where you can read and post reviews on various places and search for them.

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You may be a little confused by the name, but you read it right, it’s not location-based photo tagging, but the opposite. The concept behind the Trover app is unique enough to warrant such a caption. There is a suite of travel and photo-sharing apps for iOS users, but this app somehow manages to combine these two utilities into one, allowing users to see what sights are near them. And by “see,” we mean really see, like a picture uploaded by past users! So, instead of just reading about a place and the sights it offers, you can actually see all the notable things associated with a particular area and thus learn so much more.

The app’s interface makes it feel like you’re really traveling through the various sites near you. As you scroll down, the distance from your current location (displayed at the top of the app) also increases, and the recommended driving mode also changes. You can walk to a place within a mile of your current location, but you would have to take a plane to cover a thousand miles.

The photos you see on the Trover home page are sorted according to their distance from your current location. Once you tap on a particular image, the details of the location are displayed, along with comments from users who have visited it in the past. Scroll down from the details and you’ll get a map of the location associated with your current location. If you really like the location you discover, you have the option to Share it with your contacts on Twitter and Facebook or via email.

The feeds as well as the favorites In sections show photos added by users who may be near you or anywhere in the world (depending on the popularity of the publication). All in all, a pretty good app with a neat interface and cool concept, and on top of that, it’s free! Click the download link at the end to download Trover from the iTunes App Store.

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The official mobile client of the social network is available for iOS, BlackBerry, Android and webOS. The typical features of full-featured Facebook clients include status updates, viewing feeds, events, walls, user information, sharing links, adding messages, uploading photos and watching videos. Relatively recently, Facebook released another official mobile application called Facebook Messenger, positioned as a “fast way to send mobile messages to friends.” Facebook Messenger’s functionality is limited to text messaging, and all of the app’s additional functionality is limited to the ability to add photos and current coordinates, as well as group discussions. But Facebook Messenger will help to communicate with users of Facebook and those who don’t have Facebook-accounts, but by means of text messages.

Facebook has not forgotten about the owners of usual cell phones, whose functionality can be improved only due to JAVA applications. A program has been released, the essence of which follows from its name – Facebook for Every Phone. The compatibility list of the application includes more than 2500 different cell phone models. It allows you to read your news feed, view and upload photos, correspond with your friends, edit your personal profile and even create a new account. Also, without leaving the application, you can work with the device camera and access the address book.

Following Facebook and WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger has passed an important milestone.

Another application that is part of the Facebook ecosystem passed the milestone of 5 billion downloads in the Google Play app store – Facebook Messenger.
The third non-Google app in history to break the milestone of 5 billion downloads on Google Play

If you don’t count Google developments, only two other applications around the world managed to achieve this result – the client of the social network Facebook itself and the messenger WhatsApp, which was once bought by Facebook.

Overall, Facebook Messenger became the fourteenth app to join the “club of 5 billion on Google Play,” along with YouTube, Google Maps, and Gmail.

Despite no small amount of controversy, this milestone shows how much people rely on Facebook for communication. The company is now working to expand its “chat empire,” which will eventually allow all three of Facebook’s messaging apps to work together – Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

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The easiest way to record videos and share them with friends

Socialcam is an application that is very similar to Vine in that it allows you to record, capture and play videos from your Android device and share the resulting videos with your friends.

The working principle of this application is completely identical to how Instagram and Vine work. You will be able to subscribe to other users to keep track of video updates in their feed, leave comments and “likes”.

When recording videos in Socialcam, you’ll have over a dozen different filters available for you to apply to your videos in real time. You can also upload videos you’ve recorded in the past to create high-quality video compositions.

Socialcam, just like other applications, lets you add tags to your videos so other people can find your videos more easily. In the same way, you can search for videos from other users that you are interested in tagging.

Socialcam is a really cool social video network. And while Socialcam doesn’t have a large user base yet, it already offers a lot of interesting content.

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