Ah, the famous selfie! The word of the year, the Oscar made – famous hobby, the pride and glory of all Internet users from all walks of life, perhaps the most appraised, mocked and common activity of people having a phone in their hand. Taking selfies is more than a practice, it became a cultural “thing” that invaded our lives and it looks like it is here to stay for quite some time.
Enter FaceSnap for iOS, a new app that allows iPhone users to take selfies with a lot less effort than reaching out their arms, focus on a posture, get the angle right, tap the camera button and still manage to look decent. What is this amazing app, you might ask yourselves? Simply put? The FaceSnap for iOS
is a photo timer for your smartphone. It takes a series of selfies in successive bursts, pausing a few seconds between each take to let you decide on a pose. That way you can spend less time focusing on pulling the trigger and more time mugging for the camera.
A timer for the phone camera? Don’t we already have some of those on several of our Samsung models and the HTC One? Well, you’ll be surprised to find out that the large majority of standard iOS and Android powered cell phones actually don’t feature a timer for their high – end cameras. What is quite surprising about this app is that it took developers quite some time before coming up with a simple solution for introducing a timer. Following this trail of thought, the selfie aficionados should also know that the app is available for $0.99 and that FaceSnap is more than a timer.
It also encompasses two other features powered up by a room – scanning technology that goes by the name of Galileo. If the simple “timer” allows you to snap 3 pictures in a row of your beautiful face and pose, the Party Camera option scans the room you’re in and snaps a series of five consecutive pictures when it detects a face. The second Galileo powered feature, called Room Surveillance, will snap a single picture of a face it recognizes after randomly surveying the space around you. Now if you think these features are a bit creepy, you are not the first to notice that the app may allow people to engage in nefarious activities. Just as Alyssa Bereznak says,
Depending on whose hands this falls into, these tools could be awesome or creepy: awesome because they’re a great way to capture candid images of your friends at a party or crowded room; creepy because the ability to discreetly hold your iPhone up, scan a room for faces, and take photos could be abused by stalkers and weirdos in public places.
But before you get a bit paranoid, let’s just have some fun with the FaceSnap for iOS and take those brilliant selfies we always dreamed of! If you want to know more about the FaceSnap’s user guidelines, you have here a very detailed explanation.