Instagram Landscape and Portrait Mode Are Here! Third-Party Apps No Longer Needed

Instagram just introduced one of its most significant changes in recent memory — landscape and portrait modes for photos and videos. In addition to the traditional square photos, Instagram now natively allows the ability to post media in portrait and landscape orientations. This means you can post your photos and videos as they were originally shot.

No more cropping videos that you shot in widescreen, or selfies you took in portrait mode. According to the company, nearly one in five photos or videos people post aren’t in the square format. With the help of third-party apps Instagram users have been able to accomplish posting media without cropping it.

With today’s update, it sounds like those third-party apps are destined to become obsolete. The company admits, “we know that it hasn’t been easy to share this type of content on Instagram”, but now that problem has been fixed. Here’s how it works: Choose a photo or video Tap the brand new format icon on the bottom left to adjust the orientation. Choose your filters, and so on. Once shared, the full-sized versions of your media in landscape and portrait format will appear in a much more natural way than it would have before with a third-party app.

On your profile screen the photo grid will remain square — any media that’s not natively square will appear as a center-cropped square. In addition, all filters can now be used for all types of media. There’s no longer filters just for photos and filters just for videos. Those are two major changes in one day that are sure to change the landscape (pun intended) of Instagram for the foreseeable future. Widescreen video opens up a lot of new opportunities.

Even when using third-party apps in the past, rendering and uploading widescreen video was a terribly tiresome process. Now it sounds like it will be just like uploading any other video. With this update you can check ‘landscape/portrait mode’ off the list of most wanted Instagram features. Next, it would likely please a lot of people if the app offered a native re-gram feature. Editorial 

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Facebook Launches M, a Siri-Like Personal Assistant for Messenger

Today Facebook announced its beginning a very small roll out of a digital assistant service that will live within Messenger. The service, called M, is capable of completing tasks and finding information upon request.

Bangla Newspaper Blogger Template Facebook’s M calls to mind Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, but what sets M apart is how you interact with it. While Siri and Cortana are built for voice commands, M is designed to be communicated with via text message.

In one of the examples shown, M is asked to recommend an item and then later asked to have it purchased for the user. The whole exchange is completed within Messenger as though chatting with a friend.

M is empowered in a way that sets it apart from other digital assistants. M has the ability to complete tasks such as reserve hotels, make purchases, book flights, recommend things to do, and so on.

Since it is powered by artificial intelligence, which is trained and supervised by people, it’s able to complete requests that require it to think. It’s capable of making personalized recommendations and can even navigate customer service hotlines if that’s what is necessary to complete a task.

M will be available to a “very, very small” number of people in the Bay Area to start, according to a company spokesperson, but the idea is to build it into an at-scale service.

It’s built for both iOS and Android and is said to be slowly rolling out more widely in the coming months.

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