Roll shipped yesterday. I wrote about the design a few days ago — the pull-down contact sheet, why it’s a rewrite — so this is the other half: what’s actually in the launch build, as posted to the community.
The headline feature is the wheel. The brightness wheel maps to a filter wheel, so changing looks is a physical gesture — you turn a dial on the side of a camera, the way it should be. The filters it turns through got out of hand in the best way: a Game Boy look, dithering, halftone, the old OS X Photo Booth effects, film emulations with baked-on date stamps in three styles, and purikura — the Japanese photo booth look, with dozens of settings including four-shot strips like the real booths print.
The rest of the launch list, quickly: QR reading built into the viewfinder. Favorites. A level, for people who can’t hang a photo straight (me). Shutter and focus sounds. A simple mode for quick shots. Noticeably faster capture and display than stock — the phone’s camera finally feels snappy. If you use my iMessage app, photos send straight from the roll. And shake-to-report, like everything I ship, so when it breaks on your unit I actually find out.
Two apps of mine make it better together: BrightControl can bind the hardware camera button to Roll, so the physical button opens it like a default camera should.
One launch-day lesson that had nothing to do with code: within hours, a commenter looked at my sample photo and identified not just the neighborhood but the floor I took it from. New York window views are fingerprints. Consider which windows you post.
It’s free and open source, like everything else: github.com/gi-os/LightCamera. Tell me what it needs. The best ideas in this app already came from other people, and I expect that to continue.