Apple Will Kill This
Over the course of my career as an indie iOS developer, I’ve designed a few unique solutions to problems, sometimes only for Apple to steal my thunder. One good example is with an old app called Flare. With it I created a camera that did five things that the native camera (or Instagram) had yet to implement: zoom for video, live filters, faster loading, pinch to zoom, and tap and hold to lock focus/exposure.
The last two features came by paying attention to people, and from my own desire as a photographer to have a simple, workable solution to controlling how my videos looked. Pinch to zoom seems obvious now, but few had done it at the time, for whatever reason. (In fact, it’s only since iOS 7, over two years later, that zoom for video was included in the native camera.) I thought it was strange that Apple hadn’t included this option from the beginning, and for a while I assumed they knew something I didn’t. But, after constantly witnessing tourists pinching at their iPhones in a vain attempt to zoom in on a friend, I had to put it out there.
The UX of pressing to lock exposure/focus, however, was certainly exclusive to my app…I had tried them all in an attempt to crack this nut, hoping to copy someone else’s solution, but none of them did it for me. It may sound silly, but figuring out the UI for exposure/focus lock nagged me for weeks.
In the end, I decided that press-and-hold was the most “correct” way to do it, since it was just a “longer” version of the tap— the UI for temporary exposure/focus. (I chose it, even though it wasn’t as discoverable as I would have liked—In fact, many of you may have not even realized that you can do this in iOS, though it’s been around since October, 2011.) It was just one of those perfect solutions, which Apple would independently come up with months later in iOS 5.
Flare received many hundreds of thousands of downloads, but it wasn’t because of either of these two features. In hindsight, I had tried to do too much with it—being a faster, better camera, as well as implementing efficient live video filtering and creating an entirely new look for video. I succeeded in all of these—at least technically—but lost marketability with advanced features being hidden behind more obvious ones. This would need another article to discuss in full, but suffice it to say that I learned a lesson about knowing your market.
Most recently I decided to build a fitness app for the iPhone 5s, knowing Apple will certainly create their own, and probably soon. Have I not learned my lesson? Perhaps I haven’t. But maybe, like I keep saying, I just have to put it out there.
This summer just before WWDC, I wrote my predictions for the iWatch, envisioning Apple’s move into wearable computing. The release of the iPhone 5s in September, containing a special motion coprocessor built just for tracking and analyzing activity, blazes a trail for that iWatch. It’d certainly blow my app out of the water, but, hey, I want the iWatch and I want it now. My app is still the closest thing—at least without buying additional hardware.
I suppose I’m driven to find the simplest solution to a problem, and so is Apple. Because of this, we often come to the same conclusions, the same solutions to problems. But sometimes I get there faster.
(NB: If you’d like learn about my stuff faster, follow me on Twitter. If you have an iPhone 5s or above, try Fitly. It won’t cost you anything.)
An addendum: with the Apple Watch, Apple has gone into fitness apps, and has done a great job of it. Their three-tiered circular progress UI is a great solution to something I often struggled with with Fitly. All things considered, I think if you have a Watch, their Fitness app is the bees knees. If you don’t, Fitly is still a good, simple solution.
