by Dan Moren
Clips 2.0: The spiritual successor to Photo Booth?
I was trying to figure out what exactly Clips 2.0 reminded me of–I kept thinking iChat, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Karan Varindani nails it:
Playing with the Selfie Scenes in Clips last week, I had the same feeling that I did playing with Photo Booth on my Mac many years ago. It was a little surreal, as someone with incredible front-camera shyness, to find myself having so much fun with it. The whole experience had me thinking: In a few years, once the Face ID technology has spread to the rest of the iOS line (and maybe even the Mac), could Clips be the successor to Photo Booth? Between Selfie Scenes, stickers, Live Titles, and fast sharing to social media, it seems the perfect fit.
My cousins’ kids loved playing with Photo Booth on my Mac when they were younger, especially the distortion effects. I’d reclaim my MacBook twenty minutes later and have 60 new pictures, and they’d all be in hysterics. As Karan points out, though Photo Booth came to the iPad, it never quite made it to the iPhone. But it’s not hard to see Clips as the spiritual successor, right down to the selfie scenes, which are way more impressive versions of the old iChat effects from yesteryear.
But in this era of Snapchat and Instagram, can Clips capture the same joy? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to see Apple make a play for it. I enjoyed the initial release of the app back in April and the second version seems to have a lot of cool stuff going for it, including licensed content from Disney and Lucasfilm. I haven’t had too much time to play around with it yet, though.
It’s a little curious that Apple chose not to include animoji in there, since we’ve already seen third parties try to encroach on the territory by building standalone apps for recording the talking heads. Perhaps it’s because they only work on the iPhone X, or perhaps it’s one of those instances of one Apple team not talking to another. Then again, maybe we just need to wait for Clips 3.0.