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Download these 5 great apps to digitize old photos and create 360-degree videos

Thanksgiving is nearly here, and you’ll need a few apps to keep the arduous turkey-roasting process out of your mind for a few hours. This week, we’ve got an app from Google that will make your grandparents love you all over again, another that lets you explore marijuana into great detail on the go, and more.

Check out these five apps of the week.

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Photoscan by Google

photoscan
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Google Photos team has thought up a way to bring your physical photos — the ones catching dust on the wall or in an album book — into the digital world. Rather than paying for someone to scan them or buying your own scanner, Photoscan lets you do the job yourself with just your smartphone’s camera. The app uses machine learning to remove any glares and other distractions, resulting in a digital copy of the image — one good enough to share online at a whim. You’ll be the life of the party on Thanksgiving.

iOS Android

Wikileaf

wikileaf
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Whether it’s for medicinal or recreational use, you may not have the faintest idea of how to purchase marijuana. There are so many different strains, it’s understandable. Enter Wikileaf, a polished app that makes it easy to locate the nearest dispensary with your favorite strain. As the app’s name suggests, you’ll also be able to read up on all the different strains, their lineage, and how they can help your ailments. Of course, marijuana isn’t legal everywhere, and this app only shows dispensaries in areas where it is legal.

iOS Android

The Trail

the-trail
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Trail is a new game by Peter Molyneux, the mind behind prominent games such as Godus and Fable. In Trail, you control a character on a journey to reach the town of Eden Falls. You walk along a trail, and along the way you’ll learn how to scrounge for food, craft items such as shoes, and eventually — settle and build. This game has in-app purchases.

iOS Android

Pie

pie
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Pie is an iOS-only app that makes creating 360-degree videos easy as … well, pie. Rather than buying a 360-degree camera, why not use the one integrated into your phone? Move your phone in an arc to capture a “slice,” which the company says is a blend between a GIF and a Boomerang. Once you’ve made your video, you can add filters and emoji and share it on the Pie platform for others to view. You can even attach your own 360-degree camera, if you have one, to upload even better content.

iOS

Fingerprint Gestures

fingerprint-gesture
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’re an avid Android enthusiast, chances are you’re disappointed that fingerprint gestures — like the ones on Google’s Pixel smartphones — didn’t make the cut to the Android 7.1 Nougat update for Nexus devices. Well, Fingerprint Gestures is an app that’ll do what Google didn’t — it unlocks a number of gestures for your fingerprint sensor, and then some. Unlike the Pixel, where you’re restricted to swiping the notification bar up and down, the app lets you perform gestures such as single tap and double tap so you have more control over your device.

Android

Julian Chokkattu
Former Mobile and Wearables Editor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
HuggingSnap app serves Apple’s best AI tool, with a convenient twist
HuggingSnap recognizing contents on a table.

Machine learning platform, Hugging Face, has released an iOS app that will make sense of the world around you as seen by your iPhone’s camera. Just point it at a scene, or click a picture, and it will deploy an AI to describe it, identify objects, perform translation, or pull text-based details.
Named HuggingSnap, the app takes a multi-model approach to understanding the scene around you as an input, and it’s now available for free on the App Store. It is powered by SmolVLM2, an open AI model that can handle text, image, and video as input formats.
The overarching goal of the app is to let people learn about the objects and scenery around them, including plant and animal recognition. The idea is not too different from Visual Intelligence on iPhones, but HuggingSnap has a crucial leg-up over its Apple rival.

It doesn’t require internet to work
SmolVLM2 running in an iPhone
All it needs is an iPhone running iOS 18 and you’re good to go. The UI of HuggingSnap is not too different from what you get with Visual Intelligence. But there’s a fundamental difference here.
Apple relies on ChatGPT for Visual Intelligence to work. That’s because Siri is currently not capable of acting like a generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, both of which have their own knowledge bank. Instead, it offloads all such user requests and queries to ChatGPT.
That requires an internet connection since ChatGPT can’t work in offline mode. HuggingSnap, on the other hand, works just fine. Moreover, an offline approach means no user data ever leaves your phone, which is always a welcome change from a privacy perspective. 

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EU iPhone users are getting another exclusive perk with iOS 18.4
Installing iOS 18.3 update on an iPhone 16 Pro.

The iOS 18.4 update is in beta right now, and it introduces a new option for users in the EU to set a default navigation app. This means no more pesky links opening in Apple Maps when you only use Google Maps -- but it won't be available for people in the U.S.

The EU's Digital Markets Act is forcing Apple to make various changes to its services, but unfortunately not all of these perks make it over to the U.S. Apple has made it clear that it doesn't agree with a lot of the rules the EU is setting, so a lot of the time, it only makes the changes when and where it absolutely has to.

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This app will literally have you touch some grass to unlock bad apps
An app that detects when users touch grass.

In 2023, the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) released a social media and youth mental health advisory, noting that a staggering 95% of teenagers, between 13 and 17 years of age, report using social media 'almost constantly.'

“People with frequent and problematic social media use can experience changes in brain structure similar to changes seen in individuals with substance use or gambling addiction,” said the detailed report, citing research.

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