Get Instagram photo backgrounds on your Michael Kors smartwatch

In a couple of days, the My Social app for Michael Kors will let you use photos from your Instagram feed to become your watch face. That is, if you own one of the brand’s Access watches, specifically the Dylan and Bradshaw models.  The app will be coming to these smartwatches via an over-the-air update on April 25^th. The video above shows just how you can make the change. You just need to sign into your profile, select the photo you want to use and the filter for it, and then select the watch style.

There’s no word yet if they plan to integrate other social networks into the app or if more models will be added. It makes sense to start with Instagram though as the app has visually stunning images with some users opting to use the service as a visual portfolio of sorts.

Source: Engadget

Instagram announces Android to get offline mode

Reaching out to Instagram users with limited network connectivity or those without data plans, the social network is bringing offline support for its Android app as announced at Facebook's F8 developer conference. They started with Android first as it’s considered the preferred type of device in the developing world. According to Tech Crunch, Instagram is exploring the possibility of bringing it to iOS, too.

In offline mode, you will be able to see previously loaded content in your feed, profiles you visited before and old versions of the Explore tab will be visible, too. You’ll be able to leave comments, like photos, unfollow people, or save media. All these actions will then be carried over once you reconnect.

Instagram takes cues from Pinterest with new feature called Collections

If you’ve been saving random photos on Instagram haphazardly, the social network now wants to help you organize them with a new feature. Called Collections, you can now organize your saved posts in a way that makes sense to you. It’s rather similar to how Pinterest does things. But instead of collecting everything you find online, this is limited to what you find on Instagram and these collections are kept private so others won’t see what you’ve been saving.

When you save a post now, you’ll either get the option to create a new collection or add it to an existing collection. For organizing the posts you already have, you can head to your saved posts and tap on the plus icon in the upper right. The feature should be rolling out to both iOS and Android apps now.

Source: Digital Trends

Instagram merges permanent and disappearing personal messages

There used to be two different places for ephemeral and permanent messages on Instagram’s Direct feature. But that’s changing with this new update. The disappearing messages will now show up in the permanent chat thread. The ephemeral messages will still disappear after the photo and video have been viewed but a note will be left behind mentioning something was shared there before. The change is made to make it easier for you to keep track of your conversations on the service.

Source: The Verge