One month ago we launched Spectre, our new long-exposure photography app. It was very well-received — I was so grateful to see not just enthusiastic responses about the capabilities of the app and the stunning shots people have taken with it, but also many delighted comments at the work we put into making its design special. Spectre — if you’re not familiar — is an app that lets you take long exposures: photos that previously required a bulky setup of a big camera, a tripod, filters, and more. Spectre gets around all this with computational photography. It takes hundreds of photos and combines them in real time. It uses computer vision to correct for handheld shots, so there’s usually no need for a tripod. Coming from traditional long exposure photography, the Spectre experience is game-changing. Just hold the phone steady and tap: This isn’t the first camera app I’ve designed: I previously wrote about the design of Halide, an our first app, which gives people more control over their iPhone camera. But Spectre is an entirely different beast, with its own serious design challenge: hiding the complexity behind all that technology. We really wanted to enable users to just take photos without fiddling..