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Last year, Steven Soderbergh released “High Flying Bird,” his second consecutive film, shot entirely with an iPhone. It’s available on Netflix. 🤯

Last week, Nat Martin dropped Diorama, a tool for making beautiful movies with your phone.

Nat, CEO of Litho and one of the makers of Diorama, says now you can create Jurassic Park-like films anywhere from your bedroom to the beach. You can produce far more sophisticated animated visual effects than ever previously possible on your phone.

This is great news for makers and creators who want to create better content without spending a fortune. The iPhone is a pretty powerful machine as explained by Nat, “If you have an iPhone with an A12 chip or newer, actors can also interact directly with the props in your scene through body tracking, and the app has a selection of live video filters, which help blend virtual objects with the camera feed.”

To get the most out of Diorama, you’ll need an iOS device with ARKit support (generally iPhones no older than 5 years will support this) and a Litho AR controller which costs $99.

We’ve seen smartphones replacing photo cameras and now with the latest AR developments, we’re seeing smartphones getting into the big screens. Just imagine how many more talented producers will get a chance to bring their visions into reality.

Here are some early reactions from the community:

“Wow. That is sick. I've never seen such an interesting use of AR. Just awesome.” – Mi Wy

“The UI and workflow shown in the second video is just amazing.” – Aidan Wolf

“Looks cool! I like that you are recognising that accessibility and ease of use are a key to make it go viral!” – Sabina Weiss

Dreams of becoming a movie star suddenly don't seem so far fetched. 🎬

2020 has brought us some wild surprises, and tech is no exception.

Yesterday, Amazon held its hardware event and announced new products. One of the most innovative announcements is the Always Home Cam, a flying security camera for your home and it’s pretty wild.

Ring (owned by Amazon) launched an autonomous drone that can fly through your home giving you a view of whatever room you want without having to install cameras everywhere. Instead of getting multiple security cameras, get one that flies around your house on preset paths. And if you were wondering, no, you can't control it manually.

If you missed the full Amazon event yesterday, here’s a short version of everything that happened:

Amazon redesigned Echo and Echo Dot giving it a spherical look; revealed the new Echo Show 10 that now supports Netflix, and showed off a new cloud gaming service called Luna. 🎮

Ring announced the flying Always Home Cam, Car Cam, and other security improvements. 🚨

Amazon also updated Fire TV Stick, Eero 6, and Eero Pro 6, as well as unveiling multiple Alexa improvements including a new chip AZ1 Neural Edge and Alexa Guard Plus security monitoring system. 🗣

Would you feel safer with a drone in your home or will it end up as target practice for house cats everywhere? 😺

It turns out talking paintings from Harry Potter are real and you can create one yourself. It’s fun and creepy at the same time. Who knew our very own Ryan Hoover could sing like this? 😜

There’s a new meme generator called Puppets.World that launched on Product Hunt just last week. Record a video and bring a static portrait to life with AI.

You can create your own puppet from any photo of a person, a portrait painting, or even a hand-drawn sketch. It even mimics facial expressions from your video. 🥴

While deepfakes can have some serious implications in the wrong hands, (identity theft, cybersecurity, anti trust to name a few) one of the makers, Svetlana Ragimova, explained the difference between deepfakes and the app’s tech, “The technology developed by Puppets.World may look like deepfake, but it's different. It's closer to face tracking, which is used in computer games and movies to create lifelike characters.”

It’s fun to prank your friends, send birthday wishes to your family, and create cringe-worthy memes to share on social media but the creators are optimistic about commercial cases, “it could be used in business: as an avatar for contact centers, with integration to chat-bots. We plan to do voice-only animation — when a puppet doesn't need a video, just voice recording. And later — only text.“

Here’s what the community is saying:

“I can see the memes coming!” – Jordan Westerman

“This is so scary but so awesome at the same time.” – Marcos Do Canto

“The quality is impressive.” – Jeffrey Wyman

If you want to have fun with your friends using AI, you may also want to play with these apps:

Familiar lets you deepfake yourself into fun GIFs with a single photo.

Impressions create your own high-quality celebrity deepfakes in minutes.

Alethea.AI positions itself as a Cameo-like marketplace for deepfakes.

Muglife is an app that creates 3D character animations from any photo.

Avatar SDK is an AI-powered 3D avatar creator.

FaceApp transforms your face using AI in just one tap bringing you realistic effects.

MakeApp is an AI-based app that adds and removes makeup from any face.

Avatoon creates cartoon-style avatars that stand out.

Custom home screens are in right now. iPhone users are going wild with the latest iOS 14 customization options.

Earlier today, Maksim Petriv dropped Widgetly, allowing you to further personalize your iOS home screen with photo widgets, solid background widgets, and time display.

As we wrote earlier this week, Android users have had these customization features for some time, but if you’re an iOS fan, it’s time to get creative with your personalized home screens.

While Widgets are the latest addition to iOS, the custom icons workaround, which is actually a custom shortcut, has been around for some time and has gone largely unnoticed.

Here’s what to do if you’re having real FOMO and want to customize your app icons and don’t yet have the iOS 14 update:

1. Open up Shortcuts app on your iPhone
2. Tap on a plus icon (+) to create a new shortcut
3. Tap on Add Action
4. Tap on Scripting
5. Choose Open App
6. Tap on dimmed Choose button
7. Choose an app
8. Tap on three dots (•••) button
9. Type a shortcut name
10. Tap on Add to Home Screen
11. Tap on the icon at the bottom and take or choose a photo
12. Tap on Add link at the top right corner
13. Tap Done to confirm and repeat until you have a look you want.

Beautiful home screens as a trend is super hot right now and reportedly even pushed Pinterest to the App Store’s top charts and crushed its daily downloads records thanks to people seeking inspiration for their customizations.

Ordering your apps by category just isn’t going to cut it any more. 😅

We can't wait to see what you all create. Let us know on the post page or over on Twitter.

P.S. What are some apps you wish had an iOS 14 widget? 🤔

When your product raises $185 million and is celebrated among makers, big tech notices.

Google’s in-house incubator Area 120, just launched Tables, a tool for collaboration, workflow, and automation.

This new Google tool is drawing some direct comparisons with the no-code giant Airtable, which recently upgraded its new platform with Sync, Marketplace, Apps, and Automation while raising $185M. We wrote about this in more detail just last week.

Google positions Tables as a project management tool to get teams on the same page (and the same virtual table) with bots, automation, and seamless integration to other Google products like Sheets, Groups, and Contacts.

While there are many productivity tools in the market and many adopting a Kanban board approach, Trello, Monday.com, Asana to name just a few, Google has an advantage of tapping into its existing user base of millions of users already invested in Google’s ecosystem (Gmail, Drive, Docs).

The product was launched in a Google-like freemium fashion.

You can use Tables for free, with support for up to 100 tables and 1,000 rows. The paid plan includes a 3-month trial, starts from $10/month/user giving you up to 1,000 tables and 10,000 rows/table.

Would you switch to Tables?

The newly released iOS 14 brought some new features to iPhone and iPad users.

Most notably widgets. Yeah, we know Android users already have this, but it’s an exciting refresh and opportunity to personalize your home screen. We’ve seen you all getting creative on this already. You can even change your own icons (for better or worse, sorry icon designers!) 🎨

This weekend Aviary launched its modern iOS client for Twitter. It's simple enough to pick up and use immediately, with pretty cool features that let you tweak it just the way you want. Built for iOS 14, it has widgets, an ad-free feed and tweet filters.

The app is a one-time purchase ($4.99) and includes iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and (coming soon) Mac apps.

Here are some early impressions from the community:

“My favorite Twitter client, hands down. Congratulations on the big launch!” – Emmanuel Crouvisier

“I like! Reminds me of the Big Sur design 😉” – Michael Sieb

“I've been following this app development on @jpeguin1 twitter and it's visible that he does care about delivering a high quality product. It looks great :)” – Bunn

If you already installed iOS 14, here are some other apps that have widgets you can play with today:

Brief helps you understand the most important news in just a few minutes.

Soor is a premium music player app with full Apple music support.

Spark is a smart, fast, and free email client for iPhone with calendar features.

Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form and track good habits.

Weather Line is a visual weather forecast in a simple infographic.

Nudget positions itself as the budgeting app for the rest of us with speed and simplicity built-in.

Birch is a photo notes organizer for visual individuals.

Glimpse lets you add any webpage as an iOS 14 home screen widget.

Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled Oculus Quest 2, the much anticipated update to Oculus Quest that launched on Product Hunt 2 years ago.

Oculus Quest 2 includes a redesigned, all-in-one form factor, new Touch controllers, higher resolution display, a lighter headset AND it’s $100 cheaper than it’s predecessor at $299. As Brian Lee calls out, “From a tech perspective, the price to power value is amazing... There is nothing like this on the market.”

Facebook appears to be going all-in on the Quest platform as it confirmed the end of any future Rift or PC-only headset developments. Sorry if you were using and enjoying one. 😬

Many household name games are also coming to Quest 2, like Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, Myst, Beat Saber, Star Wars, and Medal of Honor, amongst others.

But VR is more than gaming. With the new Quest 2, you’ll be able to get in shape with a fitness tracker Oculus Move, and if you’ve missed your colleagues, you can get back to a (virtual) office with Infinite Office.

VR might have been a slower burn than many early adopters originally thought, but could this be the tipping point to make it more accessible?

Earlier this week, Airtable’s Product and Software Engineer, JB Bakst, announced Airtable Marketplace.

To most creators, it means that you can build custom apps on top of powerful Airtable infrastructure and get inspiration or reuse what others have created.

“Since day one, Airtable has been working towards our vision of being a true application creation platform, and today we’re releasing three critical pieces of the puzzle: Airtable Apps, Airtable Automations, and Airtable Sync.” – JB Bakst

Apps (formerly Blocks) let you create apps with add-ons, remix community creations, or build your own apps with JavaScript. Automations let you choose triggers and actions to build custom workflows. Sync links across Airtable bases.

500 million new apps are expected to be built in the next half-decade and Airtable wants to be at the top of mind for the next generation of software builders. The community is pumped:

“This is the best place for planning and organizing campaigns and content. Eager to unlock the new features and keep automating further with AT.” – Hilary Smith

“The battle over #NoCode/#LowCode/#AutomationAndWorkflows is heating up! This has the potential to be as important as the browser wars before, and then the social web wars after.” – Chris Messina

“Low code is to 2020's what mobile was to the 2010s. We are at the beginning of a revolution in moving from ME centered software to WE centered software.” – Chris Dancy

Over the last 7 years, we’ve seen Airtable evolve from a no-code tool into a powerful low-code ecosystem. Today, it powers over 200,000 users and a recent funding round put its valuation at $2.5+ billion. 🤯

In an unusual time, Apple held an unusual virtual Fall event revealing new hardware and software, but leaving out the much anticipated iPhone.

Here's a quick recap of the highlights ICYMI:

⌚️ Watch SE is a new, more affordable watch (starting at $279) with fall detection, advanced fitness features, and Family Setup with watchOS 7.

🩸 Watch Series 6 expands the health capabilities of previous models with a new feature measuring blood oxygen levels. Should be available from Sep 18, starting at $399.

✏️ iPad 8th Gen features the Neural Engine, updated hardware, and a low price tag of $329 for the basic model.

🆔 New iPad Air features an all-new and larger screen design (similar to iPad Pro), next-generation Touch ID and it comes in a bunch of pretty colors. Should be available next month starting at $599.

🏃‍♂️ Fitness+ is a new personalized fitness experience built for Apple Watch and can be used in combination with iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. Clear launch date is not yet available, but Apple promised it’s arriving later this year.

🍏 Apple One offers Music, TV+, Arcade, News+, Fitness+, and iCloud in one simple plan promising you the biggest bang, binge, and blast for your buck. Launching later this Fall with a starting price of $14.99/mo.

And finally, the new iOS updates (iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and WatchOS 7) are coming today across the Apple device lineup around the world.

TLDR; Apple revealed new Watch Series 6 and SE, updated iPad, redesigned iPad Air, and announced Fitness+ and Apple One subscriptions.

What are you most excited about?

Hi, I’m Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, you might know me as Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones, and I’m excited to share Dandi with you.

For the past 4 years, I have been lucky enough to work for the United Nations Development Programme as a goodwill ambassador. Not only have I seen the real challenges we face, but I’ve met people around the world who are trying to make it a better place.

One thing these people all have in common is that they need to spend way too much time fundraising, branding and networking – and less time doing the important work.

So we built Dandi. Through technology, video content and data, we’re helping grassroots projects and nonprofits get the funding they need to make real, positive change in their communities, and less time on all that other stuff.

You can use Dandi to discover and connect with projects in your local area, or if you’re involved with a nonprofit you can apply to our community funding program.

This year especially, challenges can feel overwhelming. We hope Dandi can give a little power back to those people seeking to make a positive impact in their community.

We will be available to answer questions over on our launch page. So please ask us anything! We’d love to hear your feedback.

Thank you,

Nikolaj