Camera Genius 1.5 update

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…