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Snapchat Competes With TikTok and Launches ‘Sounds’

Andrew Orr ·

Snapchat launched a new feature on Thursday called Sounds. It lets users add song clips to their snaps and stories, and it’s currently only available in the iOS app.

With Sounds on Snapchat, users of the iOS app worldwide can add music to their Snaps (pre- or post-capture) from a curated catalog of music. Snapchatters can add music before recording video by selecting the Sounds tool (with the music notes icon) on the right-hand side of the Camera screen and choosing a track from the Featured Sounds list. Alternately, they can select a track from the Sounds tool after taking a Snap.

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Trailer for Bruce Springsteen Apple TV+ Documentary Lands

Charlotte Henry ·

The official trailer for the upcoming Bruce Springsteen documentary Letter to You dropped on Thursday. The film shows Mr. Springsteen and the E-Street Band recording the album of the same name, the first they’ve recorded live together since Born in the USA. The film will land on Apple TV+ on Friday, October 23, the same day the album launches.

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How the iPhone 12 Pro Could Change Filmmaking

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple made great play of the iPhone 12 Pro’s camera and 5G capabilities. The Hollywood Reporter spoke to those in the film industry who think some of the features, particularly the cameras, could help revolutionize filmmaking.

“The new iPhone with Lidar, HDR, and the other camera improvements is a visual effects artist’s dream,” says Academy Award-winning VFX pro Ben Grossmann, who is CEO of Magnopus, an L.A. tech developer that worked with Jon Favreau to create the virtual production pipeline used to make The Lion King. “We used to go on movie sets to do all those things with separate pieces of hardware that could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and would take weeks to process into something useable. The notion that you have them all combined in your pocket, with the onboard processing power like that, and a connection to cloud compute over a connection speed that used to cost us tens of thousands of dollars in our machine rooms? It’s a bit more futuristic than I’d thought possible in 2020.”

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Snapchat Rolls out Lens Studio Update for iPhone 12 LiDAR Lenses

Andrew Orr ·

Snap, Inc. has updated its Lens Studio tool to let people make LiDAR lenses for the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max. It will bring a better AR experience for Snapchat users.

Version 3.2 of Lens Studio includes an interactive preview mode to provide an idea of how the LiDAR lenses work, even before the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max start shipping. Creators can also preview their LiDAR lenses in the Snapchat app if they have the most recent iPad Pro.

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Barnes & Noble Hack Revealed in Emails to Customers

Andrew Orr ·

A Barnes & Noble hack occurred on Saturday, October 10, customers learned in an email from the retailer. Data that was accessible included email addresses, billing/shipping addresses, and telephone number. Financial data like credit cards were safely encrypted.

According to Barnes & Noble’s Nook Twitter account, a “system failure” was responsible for the service interruption for Nook owners. The firm said it was “working urgently to get all NOOK services back to full operation. Unfortunately it has taken longer than anticipated, and we sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and frustration.”

This Tool Compares the iPhone 12 Size With Your Current Phone
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This Tool Compares the iPhone 12 Size With Your Current Phone

Andrew Orr ·

On Tuesday Charlotte Henry shared Apple’s comparison tool so you can quickly compare the specifications of different iPhones. Recently I found a helpful tool called Phone Sized that compares different phone sizes and tablets. Whether you’re switching to an iPhone or from an iPhone, Phone Sized gives you an idea of what size difference you can expect. “There is an option to add a credit card image which you can enlarge to match your credit card, which they will resize the other images so they will be presented in their real-life size.”