Horizon iPhone app makes sure your videos are always in landscape

If you've ever been watching the news, and someone's cellphone footage from a breaking event has popped up, you've doubtless noticed that it was probably shot in portrait format. A holdover from people inherently holding their phones vertically rather than horizontally, vertical oriented videos look bizarre and lose huge amounts of useful space when shown on a horizontal screen. But there's an app that's trying to stop you from doing that: Horizon.

Humorously mocked as Vertical Video Syndrome, Horizon gets around it by keeping the video cropped down to landscape format, even when the phone is held in portrait (or at any other angle). As it rotates, the cropped area is expanded live, until it reaches its full size. So no matter how you hold the thing, your videos will always take up the entire width of the YouTube player (or wherever else you upload them).

Of course, if you're cognizant enough of the problem to pay $1 for an app to prevent it, you're probably smart enough to just hold your iPhone sideways in the first place. But the app is still pretty nifty for being able to stay horizontal as you're turning the phone, essentially allowing you to widen the field of view just by twisting it.

(via TechCrunch)