Trim and auto-post Qik videos on Android
Two new features on Qik's Android alpha let you trim videos and quickly share them with friends and social networks.
Article updated 8/5/09 at 3:00 pm PT to clarify Qik's YouTube uploading capabilties.
It's been about a month since Qik for Android became available on the Android Market as an open alpha version. Since then, Qik has been feverishly updating its video streaming and broadcasting app. Starting Wednesday, Qik for Android (version 0.1.3) lets you trim captured videos and more speedily share them with friends, or post them to social networks.
Qik's editing mechanism comes in the form of a slider tool. It's not immediately clear how to get to this point. You'll need to film in offline mode for a start, then post-filming, tap on the "review" thumbnail to pull up the playback screen. From there, you press the "trim" button to see the tool. Though you can shave off each end by tapping endpoints and dragging them along the timeline, editing is not advanced enough at this point to support splitting. Once you reinstitute online mode, Qik will automatically shoot the edited footage up to your online account.
In addition to basic editing comes sharing. Qik's settings now contain a sign-up dialog for entering Facebook or Twitter credentials. (There's also a YouTube set-up, but that refers to a preference you'll need to spell out online; Qik for Android can't currently upload individual videos on a select basis to YouTube.com from the Android phone the way you can from Qik on other mobile platforms.) A fourth setting, shortcuts, lets you add people from your phone's address book to a new sharing ribbon on the bottom of the app. Along with the icons for your social networks, this area serves as a kind of speed dial for alerting friends about your video broadcast via e-mail or SMS. Clicking on a social network will upload the video file to Facebook and YouTube, and will send the Qik link to your Twitter feed. New settings make it possible to enter a default tweet from the phone, and to program the app to automatically upload all videos to Facebook. Better keep it clean.
Even with the sharing bar, Qik still boasts an uncluttered interface. There's plenty of room to grow to give users total control about the video capturing and creating experience, but these two features are significant steps forward.
Qik for Android alpha is freely available from the Android Market, but be aware that you may encounter bugs and other instability issues during your evaluation.