Vine (free) continues to hone its hit six-second social video app. In version 2.5 the app not only loses its former major barrier of not allowing you to upload video from your iPhone's Camera Roll, but it also gets a helpful interface revamp. Restricting videos to those shot on the spot with your mobile was one of the app's hallmarks. Allowing any video in the Camera Roll—which means any video you load onto the phone no matter when or by whom it was shot or how much it's been edited—is a game-changer for the app.

For those who haven't been following the Vine phenomenon, here's how it works: With this popular app, you shoot six-second videos either continuously or stopping and starting at will. The videos, themselves called Vines, are square, and they loop endlessly when played back on Vine's own thriving social network. You can embed the finished product into websites or share them via Twitter and Facebook. Vine's strong social networking features let you find, follow, and view the Vines of others using the service. We took the iPhone version of the update out for a spin on an Apple iPhone 5s.

Signup and Setup

The app store entry for Vine says you must be over 17 to install it, and that it contains "Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity" (among other warnings). While sexual content was a problem at the app's original launch (a porn Vine made it to the app's old Editor's Picks section), this year the company changed its license terms to disallow adult content.

The app now requires iOS 6.0 or later. It's optimized for iPhone 5, but not for iPad, where you'll either have to view it in a small window or zoom in. During our testing, the app ran fine on both an iPhone 5c( at Amazon) and a much older iPhone 4s.

As you'd expect with an app from Twitter, you can sign in with your Twitter account; alternatively, you can create a new Vine account using an email address. Other social apps typically let you sign up via Facebook, but that's not an option with the Twitter-owned Vine app. Another option is to create a private account, meaning only users you specifically approve can see your videos.

A Rethought Look for Vine

In launching the updated Vine app, many users will be relieved to notice that the shooting button has been moved to the position it occupies in virtually every other photo and video app—the bottom center. Making you reach up for the camera button at top right in earlier versions was an ergonomic misstep. Thank you, developers of Vine, for rectifying this. Now the top left and right positions are occupied by "Add new friends" and "Send a message" buttons. Along the bottom, joining the shooting button are Home (displaying your feed), Explore, Activity, and Profile.

Shooting Your Vine

To shoot a Vine video, you still simply hold your finger on the screen. You can lift it to stop recording, and you press it again to add mini-clips or even a stop-motion effect.

Extra shooting tools have accumulated since the launch of Vine two years ago. Most of these hide under a wrench icon. They include a ghost tool to help create stop-motion videos by showing you the last image shot as a transparency, a grid overlay to help you with framing, a flashlight-on button, and (new for this version) a level. The leveler is kind of cool because it switches from gold to green when you're holding the camera perfectly horizontally. Also handy is a delete button that erases the last segment you shot or loaded from the Camera Roll.

To use an existing video clip from your Camera Roll, you tap the upload icon at the left of the shooting interface, which presents a thumbnail grid of videos you've shot. Tap the one you want and then Select, and it will take you to the Trim & Crop page.

Cropping is necessary for the rectangular videos shot with the iPhone's iSight camera, and of course you'll have to trim if your video is longer than six seconds. If you have seconds to spare, you can shoot more from the app. But Vine is finicky when you're combining shooting with Camera Roll clips. When we tried adding more than one clip from the Camera Roll, it combined them only if the total time length was under the limit. If we added a longer clip, the playback would be black. In fact, the app's behavior was very strange whenever adding more than six seconds of video.

Enjoying a New View of Vines

Not only has the main app page and shooting interface changed, but a cool new feature comes to individual Vines: You can now see exactly how many times any Vine on your feed has been looped. Individual Vines are more separated, and even the like, comment, and revine buttons get a makeover with a line-drawn, folksy look. The new design doesn't distract from the actual videos as much as in earlier versions. A single button now handles not only revining but also sharing via a Web link, to a Vine contact, or to Twitter or Facebook.

As in every self-respecting social network, each user gets a profile page, and Vine's resembles Twitter's, except that Vine's offers separate tabs for Posts and Likes. On top is the user's photo, a text area for an inspirational self-description, and Follow and Message buttons. If something or someone offends you, you can report or block a profile for inappropriate posting.

If someone shares a Vine link, you can watch it on a bare-bones Vine-hosted Web page. You can view all your own and your contacts' Vines, as well as like, comment, share, and revine. But you can't actually upload Vines via the website.

Vine Messages

As with Instagram Direct, Vine Messages lets you shoot a video and share it with only the users you choose, without posting it to the Vine community at large. You shoot your private Vines as you would normally and then choose as many recipients as you like.

Note that this isn't group messaging; each recipient's response will be threaded into its own conversation. If the recipient of your Vine Message is a Vine user, he can respond with his own video or simple text. In this way, it's a little reminiscent of the messaging functions recently added to Snapchat, though Vine's messages aren't ephemeral.

Vine Ripened

For fun, fast videos, Vine is hard to beat. The service has started to develop its own flavor and a more concrete sense of a Vine as a distinct form of expression. Experience a taste of it with popular Vine users like Avery Monsen, Simply Sylvio, and Lunar Mayor, who have all pushed Vine to new heights with unique and sometimes startling content.

There's little doubt in our mind that improved shooting and editing tools have helped make Vine better, too. Despite all this, Vine has become largely a teen phenomenon, though it is used by even austere entities such as PCMag.com.

While increasing the variety of possible video content for uploading, much of the spontaneity—the reality show factor—is removed from the equation with the new ability to use any video from your Camera Roll. It will either open the service to a lot of great new content or make Vine jump the shark.

We're still not convinced that Twitter's enforced verbal pithiness translates well to video all the time. There are some subjects that cannot be contained in six seconds, and some that simply cannot be edited with Vine's existing tools. The video quality of Vines also varies wildly from device to device, and the app does not include touch-up tools to help improve blown-out or inadequate lighting, for example. Vine is a lot of fun, but limited. Instagram videos get double the time of a Vine. Editors' Choice Flickr, too, allows even longer videos and offers more-powerful editing tools. For a similar but more capable app, check out our Editors' Choice for iPhone social-video apps, Viddy.

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