One of the best parts of weddings is looking through the photos afterward to find the best pictures of you and your friends. But wedding photographers can’t be everywhere at once, so they’re bound to miss out on some fantastic photo ops.
Happenings — a recently launched social photo sharing app developed by
— wants to help you and your friends pool your best photos together. And thanks to its quick setup and Apple TV app, you can display the photos in real time during the event.
The app itself is simple. After logging in with Facebook, you can create a new “happening” or join one that has already been created. You can add your friends to a happening either by inviting them in the app (which pulls your Facebook contacts) or by sharing a unique four-character access code with them.
Once you’re in a happening, you can add photos along with 140 character captions. By design, there is no commenting or “like” functionality within the app, so the only way to contribute to a happening is by adding photos and sharing the link.
Photos in a happening can be accessed either as an Instagram-like feed or as a slideshow in your web browser or on an Apple TV device. Currently there is no view-only option for sharing a happening, so anyone invited to view a happening can also contribute to it. It is, however, possible to hide the happening’s access code while displaying the stream.
John Ostler, Eight Bit UX/UI principal, said the team is working on options for blocking people from contributing as well as a view-only feature. However, in its first iteration, they wanted to keep the app as quick and simple to use as possible.
“We kind of like the idea that anyone with the code can share,” said Ostler. “If you really wanted your photos to be secret you’d use Snapchat.”
The idea for the app came about because the Eight Bit team wanted to share photos from things like company ski trips with each other. Instead of messing around with Facebook credentials or AirDrop, they decided to develop an app that made it simple to share photos as you took them. As for the Apple TV functionality, the team figured it would put the TVs they had scattered around the office to good use.
Which additional features are added will depend on user feedback. But for now, Ostler is excited to see how others end up using the app.
Images via Eight Bit Studios.
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