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The Instagram app on iOS has a few glaring omissions: pinch and zoom, lists, hiding users and multiple account management. They're holes that were just waiting for exploitation, and now Gramatica ($1) has stepped in to do just that.
"We're just trying to make apps that we would want to use and make them the way we want to use them," says Jeremy Provost, who along with Casey McKeag owns Think Tap Work, a small software company based out of Portland, OR and Boston, MA.
Like all third-party Instragram apps, you can't use Gramatica to post to Instagram, but the app's browsing and organizational features make it worth adopting into your Insta workflow. Hiding users and photos, for example, is a feature we're accustomed to on Facebook and having that option through Gramatica clears a lot of clutter. Pinching and zooming in the app is also kind of a no-brainer, though admittedly it only works to a point because Instagram photos are small.
I have two main passions -- photography and skiing -- and I find it jarring when both communities are squished together in one feed. Lists can be created in Gramatica by grouping people you follow or by specifying a hashtag. If you create a hasthtag list, you can have Gramatica pull hashtagged photos from across Instagram or just your friends.
The downside is that if you build a list with users you follow, you can only add 10 people, a serious limitation that Provost says Gramatica is working on. Both the iPad and iPhone versions also had a hard time chewing on broad, Instragram-wide hashtag searches. They were slow or didn't work at all.
Many of the writers and editors at Wired have to keep track of their own personal Instagram accounts in addition to their work accounts. Gramatica helpfully allows users to switch without having to log out of one and into the other. But remember, Gramatica only allows a user to view feeds. The ability to post pictures to multiple accounts is something we can hope for down the road.
The iPad version of Gramatica has all the same features and a nice layout that shows six photos at once, both in landscape and portrait mode. Tapping a photo on the home screen magnifies the selected photo. The one drawback is that you can't swipe to the next magnified photo. You have to tap the selected photo again to minimize it, and then choose your next photo from the home screen.
Finally, the app lets users do all the other things we're accustomed to on the regular Instagram app. You can double tap to like a photo, leave comments, browse user's accounts, etc. Well worth a dollar.
