Snapchat has a couple of new features rolling out Tuesday, including the ability to record multiple 10 second Snaps continuously, and a new “Tint Brush” that allows you to selectively color specific objects or areas of your snaps. The Multi-Snap recording feature is coming to iOS first, with a rollout planned soon for Android, and the Tint Brush feature is launching on both iOS and Android right away.
The Multi-Snap recording feature is a big addition in terms of improving Snapchat user experience, because it means you can just hold down the record button to make sure you capture what you’re trying to Snap, instead of having to try to guess the timing and repeatedly tap and hold. It also means you can record and post up to six 10 second clips at a time, for a total of 60 seconds, which can be decorated collectively with Snapchat’s built-in creative tools and filters.
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Individual Snaps in the sequence can be deleted, meaning you don’t have to post the whole segment but can pick and choose, though they’ll always post in chronological order. But this also effectively means Snapchatters can now get away with sixty-second posts (six 10-second clips captures continuously and posted in sequence), which will change the audience experience and could prove a fundamental shift for Snapchat’s focus on brevity depending on how it’s used.
The Tint Brush feature should be familiar to anyone who’s used a color replacement or tinting app – basically you can highlight parts of your Snap using the feature, by selecting a new color, highlighting an area by tracing with your finger. The outline doesn’t have to be exact, as you can see in the GIF demo below, and it uses machine learning to select the likely target area and fill in the whole thing with the newly selected color, while also preserving image details underneath.
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Snap continues to add new and interesting applications of its technology to the app at a quick pace, which is its main competitive advantage over competitors like Instagram. But changes like Multi-Snap Recording fundamentally change core aspects of the way the service works, so this could be a very interesting development in terms of the ongoing battle between the two.