Well I haven’t posted in a little over a week. We have been working very hard to get this update done. We are getting ready to put it through the final testing over the next couple of days and get it submitted to apple. There it should take a couple of weeks in review before it’s approved. However sometimes it can take much longer. So lets hope for a quick approval.
So I guess you probably want to know what’s new? Well probably the biggest feature is tap to focus is now working for iPhone 3Gs cameras. That has probably been our biggest gripe to date. We also made several UI enhancements. The main one is there is a new guides UI to make it easier to flip through the guide options. The main menu now shows what features you have active at a given time. Finally the review photos now allows you to pan and zoom around in the photos. Also the bug which caused landscape photos to appear squashed in the review is now fixed.
We also spent an entire week trying to get geotracking EXIF data working. We tried every trick we could think of to get it to work. Unfortunately it looks like it just isn’t possible without an update to the programming SDK from Apple. We even submitted a request to Apple, who confirmed that adding EXIF / geotagging data is not possible to do at this time. I filed a formal request asking for it to be added to the SDK. I hope in the future we are provided with access to allow for this to be added. Sorry everyone that I don’t have better news on it at this point. I know everyone really wants it and we want it just as badly. I guess if there is anything positive about our week of coding is that once it’s added to the SDK, we have everything else coded to take advantage of it.
Since I am talking about what hasn’t been added. Let me discuss some other highly requested features. Deleting photos in the review section isn’t going to be possible as we aren’t given this ability in the SDK.
Faster saving isn’t possible at this time either without updates to the SDK. We have already done as much as I think is possible given the current SDK. We made the saving threaded, which makes the camera available to take photos quicker while the photos continue saving in the background. It would be really nice if apple gave us access to whatever routines they use for the default camera. Then we could save much, much faster.
Finally swiping through photos to review them like the default camera app isn’t yet available either. We have formally requested methods for all of these features and if Apple decides to provide them in a future SDK, we will be sure to take advantage of them.
The one thing Apple could do to fix 95% of the problems of the SDK. They should develop all their own apps with the programming SDK they provide for developers. This would allow for them to fix the problems that we have and would allow us to make our own apps with at least the feature set of apple’s own apps which users expect from developers.
Once we get 1.5 into review, the work on 1.6 begins. Hopefully in that build we can focus on some great new features. I think we have some amazing ideas for the future.
Stay tuned…
11 months ago
Well we had a productive weekend of coding. We were able to get tap to focus for the iPhone 3Gs fixed. This has been our #1 complaint so far and I am glad we were finally able to get it working. We want to fix a few more things and maybe add some new features before we go through the update process. Generally once an update is finished on our end it goes through a review process at Apple which lasts a couple of weeks. So we need to make the update bigger than just adding a feature at a time.
Anyway thanks very much for your patience and I hope you will be happy once the update hits the app store.
11 months ago
I look through my reviews everyday to see if people like or dislike Camera Genius. I also see if they have feature requests or if they have problems with the app.
People have a lot of nice things to say overall and a lot of great suggestions. However a few reviews are quite mean. Unfortunately the worse ones have a tendency to bubble to the top. Even though a bunch of people seem to not find the review helpful, it seems they still get to the top of the pile because Apple apparently only counts the yes for a review. They do nothing with users who didn’t find it helpful and marked no.
It’s interesting because I think someone who has a problem with an app has a greater chance of coming back and figuring out how can they hurt you so they vote the bad reviews up after writing a review. Someone who likes your program will come to the app store and write you a nice review. Sometimes they may even look at the reviews that are bad and say well that wasn’t my experience I am going to rank that review down. Unfortunately this has absolutely no effect on the bad reviews standing. They never realize that what would really help more than anything else is voting up some of the highly ranked good reviews that they found helpful.
I have no problem with someone writing a bad review. It’s their choice and they paid money for the app. I just wish that before they wrote it, they would come to me for some help. I see many of the 1 star reviews could easily be resolved with a simple email.
Maybe Apple needs to rethink how reviews are sorted so they are more fairly ranked. As it stands now the bad reviews have a huge advantage over good reviews.
11 months ago
Well we just installed a blog so I can keep everyone updated on Camera Genius and our other apps. First let me just say, THANK YOU!!! for making us the #1 paid app on iTunes. The only way I know to thank all of you is by putting all of our efforts into adding new features into Camera Genius.
We have had some great feature requests. We have been brainstorming some of our own ideas as well. We have big plans for Camera Genius. It is great to know we can focus all of our energies now into making one product absolutely superior. We get to have a lot of fun implementing some great new features into Camera Genius.
For the few gripes we have received, we hear you and will try and improve the areas you don’t like in the program.
So in the next version look for some new surprise features, some improvements in general functionality and we are going to try to get some of the most requested features implemented.
11 months ago
