There are a lot of applications taking advantage of Instagram’s API right now, and the best part about having a publicly available stream of photos for developers to use, is that they can do things that the company hasn’t even thought of.

Instaframe is no exception. We carry around our photos with us all of the time, on multiple devices. When we show our friends and family those photos locally and not on the web, we’re stuck with Apple’s boring slideshow interface on iOS. Instaframe pulls in your Instagram photo feed, and turns them into a gorgeous slideshow. You could even set your iPad aside and use it as an ever-changing digital photo frame.

Viewing and interacting with photos

You can log into Instagram via the Instaframe app to look at photos, ones in your area are shown by default if you choose not to log in. Photos slide through every 3-4 seconds, and you can manually do so by swiping right to left.

Of course you can just view your own photos if you like once logged in, or discover new ones by way of Instagram’s popular photos, your own feed of friends, or those photos taken near your location.

I’ve found that Instaframe is a nice “lean back” experience to view photos in real-time, and the interface to like and comment photos is extremely well done. Just tap on a photo once to interact with it.

Instagram doesn’t have its own native iPad app yet, so Instaframe definitely fills a void. It also answers the question I asked, “What are we going to do with all of these photos?“.

The Instaframe app for iPad is $1.99, and is definitely worth it if you’re looking for new ways to display photos to yourself or to others.

In May 2010, Last.fm announced the launch of Last.fm Festivals, a personalized guide to music festivals around the world. It enabled users to browse upcoming festivals in their locale or further afield, based on their personal music profile and, of course, their ‘scrobbling’ history.

Now, Last.fm has ported this functionality into dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, which is fantastic news for serial festival-goers with itchy feet. The only caveat is that they’re available in the US only for now, but the good news is availability will be extended across the world shortly.

The app features:

• Festival compatibility
• Festival recommendations
• Recommended festival lineups
• Learn about all the artists at any festival
• Browse or search for festivals
• Find festivals nearby or across the world
• View festivals that friends are attending

Last.fm’s recommendation engine is used to display festivals it thinks you should be attending, much in the same way it recommends new tunes to you:

The Last.fm database apparently has more than 130,000 events, and the app essentially filters this data down to around 4,500 upcoming festivals worldwide. Whilst the app’s real ingenuity lies in its recommendation engine, unregistered users can also search for festivals by name or artist, or find festivals nearby using GPS functionality or even by date:

And if you’ve been recommended a festival and want to learn more about other artists playing at the festival, you can easily access artist biographies too:

The app is compatible with Apple iOS devices running version 4.0, or Android 1.6+, and they’re available to download now.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to speak another language? Well, thanks to a brilliant new application for the iPhone released by Emirates Airlines you need to wonder no more!

iLingual is a fun little app developed by Lean Mean Fighting Machine for Emirates Airlines, the Award Winning Dubai-based career (yes, the Dubai from the news).

The application is designed to translate some essential phrases from English into French, German and Arabic!

How does it work? Quite simple really. You take a picture of your mouth (or anyone else’s for that matter), iLingual will analyze this, with the support of a complex algorithm no doubt, and prepare it for conversion into an animation.

Now, pick a phrase from any of a library of 400 or so. Hold the phone over your mouth, a must for any self-respecting tourist, and voila: you can now speak flawless French, German or Arabic to get by! Brilliant!

Furthermore, you’re free to choose whether you want a male or female voice and you may also adjust the pitch to match your own!

The video below was taken during the application’s testing in France.

The application is available free of charge, thanks to Emirates Airlines’ sponsorship, from iTunes.