For some reason, friends of mine insist on shooting smartphone videos in the vertical position. I keep telling them that they are cutting off some of the subject matter by narrowing the view. They don’t care. I think they want to be obstinate.

Funny how things work out. I just found out that there is a new app that solves the vertical versus horizontal positioning problem. I can’t wait to tell some pals about it. Called Horizon, the app holds your smartphone in a landscape mode. Evil Window Dog, the development studio who built the app, explains that if you shoot video in a vertical position, it sometimes comes out with a funky letterbox effect.

The big news about the Horizon app is that it always shoots wide shots, whether you hold your device in portrait, landscape, or even askew. Now that is a big deal.

Horizon is the first app to do this on video and in real­ time, said Evil Window Dog in a press release.

“As the user records, Horizon auto­levels videos utilizing the device’s gyroscope. The orientation of the resulting video stays corrected so that it is always parallel to the ground.”

Horizon uses a neat trick to always record in a horizontal mode.

“The app has a rectangular indicator that always stays in the center of screen. It’s within this viewport that the Horizon app is capturing. No matter how you rotate the device, this box stays centered on the screen. When you start shooting in portrait mode, for example, all you will capture is the horizontal content within the viewport.”

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