😸 Blast from the past

Hi, hello! Welcome back to the Leaderboard. In today's issue: An iconic photography format gets a modern remastering, a tool to build your own audiobooks, and a product that turns boring slides into fun movies. Let's dive in.

64x24: A panoramic camera for iPhone, inspired by the classic XPan.

65x24 is the very definition of a passion project in my mind. It’s a camera app inspired by the iconic Hasselblad XPan (photographers got giddy reading this), a vintage camera from the 90s that inspired a cult like following around the 65:24 aspect ratio. The app opens up in landscape mode optimized for panorama and comes with some cool post processing features that give you more control over iPhone shooting like brightness and exposure adjustments. So far, I love it, and I can’t find a single thing I would change. Excited to see future updates!

Projects by ElevenLabs: Structure, edit and generate long-form audio with precision.

Projects is ElevenLabs new end-to-end workflow that lets you upload very long documents and turn them into audio. Essentially, it gives you everything you need to create high-quality audiobooks on demand in minds — precise control over editing fragments, access to ElevenLab’s extensive voice library (including an AI clone of your own voice, if you’ve made one), and rendering across dozens of languages. There are lots of obvious winners here, like self-published authors and indie filmmakers, but I’ll be curious to see what other use cases emerge. Personalized educational podcasts based on textbooks, audio journals, and interactive VR storytelling environments are now all within easy reach.

VEED AI Slides to Video Maker: Turn boring slides into engaging AI videos.

I tried out VEED’s Slides to Video Maker with some simple slides on technical topics and some on literature and music. It did a solid job of making them feel more engaging—finding better ways to tell stories and share information is so important, and a tool like this can really help. One small thing, though: right now, it feels pretty business-oriented, with no fun or creative presets. But I guess that’s something they could easily add down the line.