Introducing Halide
We’re incredibly excited to launch Halide, a new take on iPhone photography.
Smartphone cameras have improved massively over the years, but the shooting experience hasn’t. The built-in camera app is a little too simple, while advanced apps feel like an airplane cockpit. We needed an elegant app for deliberate and thoughtful photography, so we built Halide.
Halide’s beautiful design keeps everything important within reach. Its intuitive gestures become muscle-memory over time — like dials on a camera. Button layout is customizable, to fit your individual style. We think it’s a tactile, connected experience that feels like holding an old-fashioned camera.
By default, Halide shoots in a smart automatic mode, but one tap toggles manual. Dive into the details like ISO, shutter speed, and white balance. Halide packs powerful tools you’d expect from profesional equipment, such as focus peaking, a detailed histogram, adaptive level grid and RAW support.
Half of photography is curation, so we built a triage workflow that’s fast and fun. Flick through recently captured shots and swipe right to favorite, left to delete. It’s fluid to pop in-and-out of the reviewer, so you can check your work in the middle of a session without breaking the flow.
Finally, we hope you enjoy the thoughtful details. It has a custom designed typeface made by Jelmar Geertsma, carefully tweaked haptic and visual feedback, and a retro-style camera manual tutorial, which highlights some of the things we packed in.
This was a labor of love. It’s an effort by two friends who love photography and found there wasn’t a tool out there that met our needs. We wanted a premium camera for our phone.
Halide will be $2,99 at launch and available in English, with Spanish, Dutch, German, and French localizations on the way. Its price is going up to $4,99 a week after release. I recommend grabbing it now!
If you enjoy it, it would mean the world to us if you could share the news on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere. And oh, a review in the App Store helps a ton, too!
Halide is built by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With. Ben has worked on Periscope, acted as a tech consultant for HBO’s Silicon Valley, and was lead on Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Sebastiaan is an ex-Apple designer and photographer that runs the San Francisco design shop Pictogram, which recently designed the Nylas email client.
