Tag: retrospective

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  • Halide
May 30, 2019

Halide: Year Two

Time flies: today marks the two year anniversary of Halide. It’s kind of wild to think that just two years ago, we were sitting behind our laptops ready to launch our camera app without knowing if it would be well-received. We knew that it was something that worked well for us, and if others found it pleasant to use, we’d consider it a success. Now, Halide is by far one of the most popular camera apps for iPhone. Tons of people use it to take photos every day. It has a sister app: Spectre. And we are now lucky enough to work on Halide and Spectre full-time and have huge plans for their future. So here we are, two years later! We did an update a year ago — so we thought we’d give a update on our last year. The Timeline We’re less than a week away from WWDC, and last year was no different. After the announcement of iOS 12, we spent Summer of 2018 working hard to prepare for the new OS. We released four small updates focused on fixing bugs and cleaning up code. We also started work on our second app, Spectre. We’re a two-person company, and we were both..
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  • Spectre
May 23, 2019

A Spectre Retrospective: Part 3 — Engineering

This is the final part of our Spectre retrospective. In this post, I’ll talk about the technology behind a computational long exposure, a few UI innovations, and our plans to share code between apps. The Computational Long Exposure We started building Spectre, among other things, to get around hardware limitations. Most iPhones can expose an image for a maximum of 1/3rd of a second, and only the latest iPhones (XS and XR) support a maximum exposure time of one second. That’s a far cry from the several seconds you need for an interesting long exposure. Why does Apple cap the hardware at one second? While it has never publicly commented on this, the longer a sensor is active, the more heat it generates. A large DSLR has plenty of space to dissipate heat while the compact, airtight body of an iPhone is another story. Heat increases sensor noise, and more importantly, it can damage components in your iPhone. It’s true other smartphones support several second exposures. They use a different set of components in a different configuration that dissipates heat in a different way. (It’s also possible those phone markers are A-OK with the stress on the components.) Every design is about tradeoffs...
Main Category
  • Spectre
April 11, 2019

A Spectre Retrospective – Part 2: Design

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..
Main Category
  • Halide
May 30, 2018

Halide: One Year Later

Leading up to Halide’s launch one year ago, Sebastiaan and I had no idea what to expect. We’d spent ten months of nights and weekends on this thing, and you still couldn’t take a photo with the volume buttons— table stakes for a camera app. But we’d set a deadline for ourselves. It was time to ship and test our theories. Eek. We set out to build Halide after trying every major camera app and being left unsatisfied. We wanted an app for thoughtful, deliberate photography, not selfies. We wanted a tactile experience that felt like a high-end physical camera. We wanted the professional tools you’d find on a DSLR. We hoped others shared our experience. We hoped critics understood what we were going for, and would forgive a few missing features. We hoped the app economy wasn’t dead, and you could still make a few bucks. At the same time, we were launching another camera app in a crowded market. We were asking for an up-front payment when freemium is the norm. This wasn’t the App Store of 2008, so we were prepared for the worst. One year later we can say Halide has exceeded our wildest expectations. Let’s dive into what we..