When you open Vine, you want to see great Vines, fast.

Now, when you open Vine, you’ll see that posts show up more quickly, even if you have a slower internet connection or if you’re offline, like on the subway or in airplane mode. You can see the difference in this Vine I made. (On the left, you can see a previous version of Vine and on the right, you see the latest version; in both cases, the device is offline.)

There are a few key changes we made to improve speed and make it possible to watch Vines when you don’t have an internet connection:
- We’ve done a lot of work to make sure the app starts downloading content, including your home feed, your activity notifications and Vines in Explore, before you even open it.
- We’ve also implemented network caching and introduced a new, smaller video file size that can be downloaded much faster when someone has a slower internet connection.

You can experience these improvements yourself by downloading the most recent version of our iOS app, and similar changes will be coming soon to Android.

Posted by Michel Loenngren (@michelloenngren)
Senior iOS Engineer

We’ve seen for ourselves – and heard from parents, siblings and others – that kids love Vine. So, we built Vine Kids, a simple new app that gives young children a fun way to watch Vines.Image composite Vine, Marnie the Dog image: Mashable

Through adorable animated characters, kids can watch videos that are appropriate for a young audience. Swiping right or left shows a new Vine, and you can tap the screen to hear quirky sounds.

The idea came about during an office conversation in early January. One of my colleagues was talking about how much his two-year-old daughter loves Vine –– he said he wished there was a separate app she could use to more easily watch posts that are appropriate for kids. That week happened to be Hack Week, a time when we get to work on projects outside of our day-to-day work. So two folks teamed up and built exactly that. Here’s a Vine of my co-worker’s daughter using the app. How can you resist that smile?!

Vine Kids is available on iOS, and you can download it from the App Store. Enjoy!

Posted by Carolyn Penner (@cpen)
Head of Communications and Marketing

Thanks to you, Vine’s second year was incredible. The Vines you created and stories you shared brought us together more than ever this year. Though it’s impossible to capture everything that happened, we did our best to tell the story of year 2 though a playlist of some of our favorite moments.
Check it out here.

These Vines capture the breadth of emotion, activity and creativity we get to experience every day. From trends that originate on the platform and develop a life of their own to those that capture a unique perspective on events around the globe, you made great things and their impact was felt far outside of our app.

On top of creating and sharing, you guys watched a lot of Vines — like, literally more than 347,186,768,222 loops, and that’s just since we started counting in April, 2014.

We’d love for you to celebrate year 2 with us and recreate your favorite Vines from the last year using #VineYear2. Our birthday is January 24, and we’ll be sharing #VineYear2 posts during the week. 

As year 2 comes to a close, we want to thank you for sharing your life with us and helping make Vine what it is. We couldn’t be more excited for year 3.

Posted by Jason Mante (@jasonmante)
Head of Culture

We all have accounts that we love to follow and whose Vines we don’t like to miss. Now, you can select your favorite accounts to be sure you see Vines from them.

Simply tap the star in the top right corner of a user’s profile to make them a favorite.

You will receive a push notification and a notification in your Activity feed every time your favorites post a Vine. At any time, you can view all your favorites or update your notifications from Settings within the app.

We’ve been testing this feature at Vine, and it’s really helped us keep up with the people and Vines we care about most. We hope you like it too!

Posted by: Felix Fung, Your ‘Favorite’ Engineer