tap tap tap ~ Blog

Announcing Music+

by admin

June 9, 201619 comments

We just got back from the Appdoption Agency and we brought home Filters for iPhone!

by John Casasanta

July 28, 20154 comments

Filters

We’ve just acquired a pretty cool app called Filters for iPhone from fellow developer Mike Rundle. We’re close to submitting our first update for it and when it’s out, I’ll have a much more substantial post detailing the acquisition, along with our roadmap plans for it. For now, here’s Mike’s post about it:

Filters has joined the Camera+ family!

It’ll be fascinating to hear your speculation on what you think we’ll be doing with Filters and how we’ll be making it work with Camera+ so take your wildest and most imaginative guesses in the comments…

Get Filters in the App Store

4 comments

Introducing snap snap snap!

by John Casasanta

July 9, 201411 comments

I’m really excited to announce that we’ve just launched a new website dedicated to all things related to mobile photography called snap snap snap. Instead of me going on about it here, I’ll just direct you to our introductory post and video by Jack Hollingsworth. Enjoy!

http://snapsnapsnap.photos/introducing-snap-snap-snap/

11 comments

Introducing MagiCam… simply perfect photos

by John Casasanta

June 18, 201412 comments

MagiCam

Our flagship app, Camera+, has just turned a ripe, healthy 4 years old. With around 12 million copies sold, it’s by far the top-selling photography app of all time. So where do we go from here?

While Camera+ and its countless imitators will always have a major place in photography, we decided to take a step back and figure out where the future of iPhone photography is headed.

One of the most significant and revealing factors had to do with the realization that most people who share photos don’t actually make any edits to them once they snap them. We saw this right from our own sharing statistics and it was reinforced through stats about the most popular sharing services.

Think about that for a second… Most people just shoot and share without doing a thing to their photos. And these are the photos that are actually shared. It goes without saying then that by far, the majority of photos taken are unedited, unfiltered, untouched in general.

So why not attempt to make every photo you shoot look amazing with absolutely no effort? Well, that’s exactly what we did with our brand new app, MagiCam. It’s a fresh, new experience in photography and the result is simply perfect photos.

Here’s Lisa Bettany to show you what MagiCam’s all about…

You can find out all about about MagiCam right here.

Or if you’re already sold, head straight over to the App Store and be the first person on your block to experience this groundbreaking pioneer of the next generation of iPhone photography apps.

12 comments

Fresh out of the oven: Camera+ 5.1!

by John Casasanta

February 20, 201423 comments

We just released Camera+ 5.1. Here are the details…

For Camera+ 5.1 we’ve made a bunch of refinements to The Lab, making the best photo editing on a mobile phone even better. We’ve made several usability tweaks to further streamline the whole experience. One slightly hidden, but handy addition is that you can now tap & hold an adjustment to reset it.

We’ve added a new setting so that you can choose whichever section you’d like to begin in when you edit your photos. This is nice if you always want to go straight to The Lab, for instance.

For those times when you want to go more intense with filters, we’ve added a new BOOST feature. You can now bump the intensity up to 200%.

You can take widescreen photos with the new 16×9 shooting mode. Bring out your inner Scorcese. Or Fellini.

Many of you were hitting a pipe too often while flapping, causing you to lose all your photos. That’s now fixed, thankfully.

And we’ve spent a good amount of time fixing bugs for this version. Many were esoteric and only occurred on particular hardware, but we did our very best to try and resolve all known issues for this release. If any of you experience any further issues, please report them to us.

Take 2: The API issue that was causing apps like Day One to not work properly with Camera+ is fixed now. For realsies this time. Thanks to the chaps at Day One for helping us to resolve this.

23 comments

Camera+ 5.0.1 is out with more fixies than a hipster gathering

by John Casasanta

January 8, 201414 comments

We would’ve gotten Camera+ 5.0.1 out a lot sooner but for some crazy reason, Apple has an annual holiday shutdown of iTunes Connect, which makes it impossible to submit updates during the Xmas holiday period. If any of you actually know what this crazy reason is (or have some even crazier theories or speculation about it), I’d love to hear it in the comments.

Anyway, here’s what this one’s all about…

This update is one of those stability releases that we all know and love. We’ve put the kibosh on a bunch of bugs and improved several little things that’ll make the whole Camera+ experience a bit better, especially with the shiny, new Lab that we added in Camera+ 5.

The app would sometimes crash when you tried to save photos edited in The Lab. That should be all fixed now.

Clarity Pro was getting a little too ambitious on occasion and he’d boost himself a tad more than the actually intensity level you set. We had a good talking to with him, and we now have an understanding and he promised it won’t happen again.

And speaking of Clarity Pro (and anthropomorphic app features), it seems like he and his older brother Clarity weren’t playing nice with each other. The way things were supposed to work was that if you had The Clarity scene set and then went to Clarity Pro in The Lab, it’d automatically be set to 100% intensity there (instead of 0%). That’s fixed now and we hope it doesn’t cause any confusion for those of you who’ve gotten used to it working the other way.

We killed a horrible, little bug where the app was crashing on launch for some people. There’s not much worse than being locked-out of your photos and we apologize for the inconvenience. The programmer responsible was forced to say 100 rosaries… and he’s an atheist, which made it all the more painful for him.

The Camera+ API has been fixed and is working smoothly again. This should fix any issues you were having with apps like Day One. Because we care.

Issue #605 has been resolved. We’d tell you more, but then we’d have to kill you.

14 comments

Introducing Camera+ 5, featuring The Lab

by John Casasanta

December 18, 201371 comments

Camera+ 5

With this huge *free* update, we’re very happy to present to you The Lab, which brings world-class photo editing to your iPhone. Our goal was to bring you best quality adjustments, delivered in a very slick UI, and we think we’ve really nailed it.

The Lab

Here’s what you’ll find in it…

Clarity Pro

At the head of The Lab you’ll find Clarity Pro, which gives you adjustable Clarity and also adds a Vibrancy Boost adjustment which really brings out the life in your photos.

Straighten

Not only can you manually straighten your photos in The Lab… we’ve also included a slick auto-straighten feature.

Tint

Tint Easily tone your photos whatever color you please. Go just a tad to set a subtle mood, all-out to make a bold statement, or anything in-between. And if you’re having a hard time choosing a color, simply roll the dice to get a random one… will it come up lucky seven or snake eyes??

Duotone

Duotone This takes the Tint adjustment and brings it to a whole other level. Try it. We’ll leave it at that.

Soft Focus

Give your photos a beautiful, ethereal quality with Soft Focus. This one’s addictive so promise not to overuse it, ok?

Film Grain

Film Grain For the look of analog film. Fully adjustable so you can get the exact look you want.

Sharpen

Sharpen This can often be the answer to a photo that came out a bit blurry.

Blur

Blur Soften harsh pics. Or go to the extreme to make the perfect iOS 7 wallpapers. More on this later… ?😉

Saturation

Saturation Take it down for a cool, faded look. Or crank it up to make your pics pop.

Temperature

Temperature Easily enables you to make your pics look “warmer” or “cooler”. It can be used for a simple compensation, or turned way up for a bold look.

Exposure

Exposure Photo overexposed? Underexposed? This is the fix.

Brightness & Contrast

Brightness & Contrast Two classic photo adjustments. You’d think that not much needs to be said about these two… but we went out of our way to make them look really good.

Highlights & Shadows

Highlights & Shadows Boost or cut the bright and/or dark parts of your photos. Compensate for imperfect lighting conditions, or go for an intense, artistic effect.

Vignette

Top-off the perfect set of adjustments with a stylish Vignette. Not only can you put on a traditional dark one, you can also go light for an airy feel.

iPhone 3GS users please note: The Lab requires some pretty intense processing and unfortunately, your meager phones aren’t fully up to the task. But instead of bolting The Lab door on you completely, we’ve given you access to the sections that didn’t melt our test phones. The 8 lucky phones that lived yielded Rotate & Tilt, Straighten, Tint, Duotone, Soft Focus, Saturation, Temperature, and Exposure.

Camera+ for iPad users please note: We have an update in the works for Camera+ for iPad that’ll be bringing all the goodness of The Lab over to the Big Screen. We tried hard to get it done in time to launch simultaneously with the iPhone version, but we didn’t make it. We wanted to let you know that we haven’t forgot about you at all and we have some very nice things in the works for iPad.

Shooting refinements

We’ve taken yet another pass at streamlining the shooting experience in Camera+. In Camera+ 5, we’ve split the exposure compensation and exposure lock controls so that you can have even easier access to each.

iPhone wallpaper crops

As mentioned earlier, Camera+ 5 enables you to make some very awesome iOS 7- style wallpapers. Here’s the ticket: Simply grab one of your favorite pics and take it to The Lab. Then crank the blur way up and add a touch of saturation. Apply one of the new iPhone wallpaper crops, and voilà… a nifty iOS 7 wallpaper is born!
Demo

A Tale of Two Dicks

Saturation We’ve renamed Effects to Filters and Borders to Frames. We’re letting you know so you can avoid that feeling you got when Bewitched switched Darrins and Roseanne switched Beckys on you without uttering a word.

New icons throughout the app

Dozens of icons in the app have been redone and have the perfect look to go with iOS 7.

Jack's Work

Shiny, new app icon

And the most obvious icon that changed for Camera+ 5 is the app icon itself. It was hard for us to let go of the old icon. But we came up with one that captures the essence of the longstanding Camera+ icon (albeit in abstract form), and fits like a glove on the first page of your home screen alongside all your other iOS 7 icons.

Say hello to Jack Hollingsworth

Since the earliest days of Camera+, professional photographer Jack Hollingsworth has been a very prolific user of the app. Today I’m happy to announce that Jack’s officially become a member of the Camera+ team. In the coming weeks, you’ll be seeing a lot more of him around here and he’s got some pretty cool things lined-up for you. Here’s a little look at some of his work…
Jack's Work

Get Camera+ in the App Store

71 comments

Camera+ icon evolution

by John Casasanta

December 13, 201313 comments

And what’s this little hieroglyph?? Maybe one of you could shed some light on it in the comments below.

Camera+ 4

13 comments

A priest, a rabbi, Camera+ 4.2.1, and a few developers walk into a bar…

by John Casasanta

October 30, 201324 comments

Camera+ 4.2.1 is hot off the… presses. Here are the release notes:

So the jury’s in… based on all the feedback from our last update, you nice guys & gals made it loud and clear that you really appreciate that we continuously update Camera+ AND that we don’t try to nickel-and-dime you in the process. There’ve been the cries of, “devs gotta eat!” by a small handful, but we’re more of the mindset that some devs can stand to shed a few pounds (we’re no stranger to the allure of the Baconator ourselves, so we can empathize).

We’re very hard at work on Camera+ 5, which will have some really awesome things in it and will be a totally free update for you… but today we have a very nice, minor update that fixes some problems that some of you are having, especially if you have an iPhone 4S.

We also fixed a few sharing issues including one where the “Open In…” feature wouldn’t always work properly. And we added a bunch of options for what you can do with the links you get after you share photos.

In this update we took a little time put more spit-shine on some of the details that we missed during the big rush to get the iOS7ified version of Camera+ out in time for the iOS 7 launch. Our excuse for missing these things the first time around is that our eyes had been recovering from being blinded by all the bright, candy colors in iOS 7.

A little qualification

I’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum as a developer… I recall the early days where I’d earn less than $1,000 per month and essentially lived in a shack to make ends meet. And at the other end, I’ve made far more money than anybody needs to live. The bottom line is that absolutely none of this has any bearing on our customers.

If we, or any other developers aren’t able to make ends meet through selling our apps, the solution is neither to blame nor to screw over your customers. It’s more along the lines of: get better at what you do… or find some other work that better suits you.

Being able to get out of bed at noontime and work out of your home in your fluffy bunny slippers is a privilege, not a right. And you need to earn that privilege. A lot of developers seem to have lost that perspective these days and sound far more entitled than the people who support them by buying their apps that they accuse of being entitled.

If you’re a developer, it’d be nice if you actually thought all of this through in an objective way before just firing off the typical defensive, knee-jerk reaction.

Hugs,
~j

24 comments

Look over there, pal… it’s Camera+ 4.2!

by John Casasanta

October 7, 201319 comments

And here are the release notes…

So the previous version of Camera+ had a little bug where burst-mode shooting would crash. We fixed that.

We almost stopped there and just called it version 4.0.3, but then figured that it’d be the perfect time to boost burst-mode snaps to full-resolution on devices that could handle it (like the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, and the unapologetically poorly-selling iPhone 5c).

That was enough to justify calling it version 4.1. And then we thought about jumping on the bandwagon where we put Camera+ out as a whole new app and let existing customers pay for it all over again. And of course there’d be the ensuing sh__storm where those customers felt cheated and we’d have to backpedal and reverse that shortsighted decision.

So it was Clear that that would’ve been a knuckleheaded move, so instead we decided to treat our lovely customers fairly and make Camera+ 4.1 a free update as we’ve always done. But then we felt like it was all give and no take… so to make us feel better about giving-in too easily, we chose to call it version 4.2. That’ll teach you to mess with us.

Then we felt bad about jumping ahead two version numbers and giving you little for your troubles. So we added a new effects pack that includes all the filters that Apple’s standard Camera and Photo apps include (for users on iOS 7). Two hours of coding (and eight trivial Core Image filters later), the Standard Effects Pack was born.

19 comments

Are those pigs flying overhead? Nope, it’s the all-new Convert 2!

by John Casasanta

October 2, 201321 comments

Even though tap tap tap is known mainly for our flashlight app, some of you may be surprised to find out that we’ve created a few other apps over the years like TV recorders and fake phone call apps.

Another one of these apps that we’ve created was Convert, which is a unit converter and calculator. Even though it’s been somewhat dwarfed by some of our other apps, Convert’s been absolutely no slouch, selling over 350,000 copies to date, making it almost definitely the most popular paid unit converter in the App Store. And today, I’m really happy to present to you the all-new Convert 2!

If you’re already familiar with Convert, the first thing you’ll notice is that it has a new visual design that fits very nicely in iOS 7. Like with our recent release of Camera+ 4, you can see that even though the visual design is all-new and is right at home on Apple’s new iOS, it still feels like the easy to use, intuitive Convert that so many of you love.

So besides the complete makeover, what’s new? The biggest addition is the full scientific calculator. With our innovative SwipePad, we’ve added two new, easy access keypad panels so that you can perform all kinds of advanced calculations right within Convert now. Simply swipe the keypad left or right to get to all this new goodness. A few of you might’ve remembered the SwipePad from when it debuted in Calcbot when we partnered with Tapbots on it… and now it’s finally come to Convert.

New unit categories, and units, and currencies

For Convert 2, we’ve added nine new unit categories, bringing the total up to 24. Here are the new ones…

Audio
Data Transfer
Flow
Frequency
Fuel Consumption
Illuminance
Shoe Size
SI Prefixes
Torque

Here are all the new units we’ve added to existing unit categories…

Energy
- Kilojoules
- Megajoules
- Gigajoules
Length
- Mils
- Nanometers
Power
- BTUs/Hour
Pressure
- Centimeters of Water
- Millimeters of Mercury
Volume
- Oil Barrels
- Cubic Yards
- Microliters
Weight
- Grains
- Troy Ounces
- Nanograms
- Micrograms
- Milligrams

And here’s the big list of the 22 new currencies added…

Argentine Pesos
Bolivian Bolivianos
Bulgarian Leva
Columbian Pesos
Costa Rican Colones
Croatian Kuna
Dominican Pesos
Egyptian Pounds
Ghanaian Cedis
Guatemalan Quetzales
Jamaican Dollars
Jordanian Dinars
Kenyan Shillings
Latvian Lati
Lithuanian Litai
Moroccan Dirhams
Peruvian Nuevos Soles
Polish Zlotys
Romanian Lei
Trinidadian Dollars
Turkish Liras
Vietnamese Dong (snicker)

Other nice, new things

When you tap & hold the favorites button, you now get a popup that enables you to immediately get to the favorite you want.

For the Clear key, we’ve added backspace functionality to it so that if you mistype one number, you don’t have to start over from scratch.

And we’ve added a bunch of settings for Convert 2. You can simplify your units picker by turning off any unit categories and units that you know you don’t need. And you can now disable automatic currency exchange rate fetching so you can save on data/roaming charges.

I’m pretty surprised that none of you typography geeks ever noticed this, but for Convert 1, we were using a dash character instead of a proper minus symbol. This has been remedied in v2. It was an absolute travesty and I’ll be strapping on a cone of shame to make up for missing it for so long.

So hop on over to get more info on Convert 2. As always, this giant update is absolutely free to all existing Convert owners. We hope you find it really useful and very nicely done. Grab it now while it’s on sale for 99¢!

http://taptaptap.com/convert

21 comments

Introducing Camera+ 4!

by John Casasanta

September 18, 201371 comments

Camera+ 4

Since WWDC and Apple’s preview of iOS 7, we’ve been crazy-hard at work on reinventing Camera+. I’m very pleased to announce that today, along with the official release of iOS 7, we present to you the next major update of the app as Camera+ 4!

Camera+ 4

We’ve revamped the entire Camera+ design and given it a brand new, modernized look. Because iOS 7 is so radically different than past versions of iOS, there was the risk that Camera+ would lose its essence. But I’m happy to say that through a lot of hard work, we’ve achieved the perfect balance where Camera+ fits-in very nicely with iOS 7, and still looks and feels like Camera+.

♫ Still skeuy after all these years. ♫

Having the opportunity to redo every area of the app gave us the chance to streamline several things. For you advanced photographers, one of the first things you’ll notice is that the shooting locks (focus / exposure / white balance) work a lot more intuitively and are much simpler to access now.

Camera+ 4 isn’t just a reskinning of the app. We’ve added several new, big things…

Exposure compensation

Exposure Compensation

Now you can adjust for overly dark or bright lighting situations before you even shoot your photos.

Square cropping

Square Crop

Square crop in the viewfinder enables you to shoot in the popular format without any extra editing steps.

New sharing and printing options

We’ve added a “Open in…” item to the sharing panel so you can now send your photos to other apps like Instagram, Dropbox, Evernote, and any other app that supports opening images from other apps.

Airdrop

And you can now wirelessly print your photos right from Camera+ on your AirPrint printer.

Airdrop

An iOS 7 exclusive. Send your photos to your friends and family with minimal fuss & muss.

As always, this big update is free to all Camera+ users. Because we love you.

BREAKING NEWS: Right after we submitted Camera+ 4, we realized that the newly added “report a bug” feature crashes in iOS 6. This is what we get for hiring a Vice-Minister of Irony. Anyway… there’s a 4.0.1 update coming out very shortly that addresses this and a bunch of other little things.

71 comments

A flashlight? WTF?! Oh, a FAST flashlight!

by John Casasanta

August 29, 201311 comments

Sooooo… we just released a flashlight app. Why? Well, I’ll tell ya…

There are a zillion flashlight apps in the App Store. But none do what 99.9% of the people who need a flashlight actually want it to do… like find the goddamn doorknob in the dark or whatever. Yeah, the others turn on the light on your iPhone, but they also have these unnecessary features (with some bordering on the absolutely ridiculous):

on/off button
compass
map
strobe light
morse code
SOS signal
brightness control
themes
fake neon crap
texting
emailing
Facebooking
tweeting
music controller
bus schedules
settings
ads

Ok, I’m kidding about the bus schedules, but in the arms race to include everything under the sun in a flashlight app, I’m sure someone’s going to add this to a flashlight app soon.

These not only get in the way when you just need your way lit (like when you’re fumbling for your keys and you inadvertently tap the on/off button that takes up most of the screen), but they also make it so that your light doesn’t instantly turn on because of the overhead of the featuritis.

So I threw together the simplest app you can possibly make for an iPhone and it just does that one thing… turn on the light… and it does it instantly. I basically made it for myself but I’m sure many of you’ll also find it useful, so we’re putting it out there for you.

Here’s a screenshot:

Fast-Flashlight

Glorious, eh? We’ve truly embraced the flat design fad for this one. It can be none more flat. If you look closely at the reflection, you can see the shark being jumped.

I made this over a year and a half ago and because the App Store is littered with flashlight apps and Apple wasn’t accepting any new ones, let’s just say that it wasn’t easy to get in the store. Here’s Christopher Walken to detail the process:

In a nutshell, we acquired an existing flashlight app, morphed it into Fast Flashlight, and then transferred it into our App Store account after Apple recently began allowing devs to transfer apps to one another.

Don’t believe that it really is the fastest flashlight around? Well, not only is it the simplest app in the App Store, it’s the only one that includes all the source code for it in its description to prove it…

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#import <AVFoundation/AVFoundation.h>

@interface FastFlashlightApplicationDelegate: UIResponder <UIApplicationDelegate>
{
}

- (void)turnLightOn;

@end

@implementation FastFlashlightApplicationDelegate

- (id)init
{
self = [super init];

if (self)
[self turnLightOn];

return self;
}

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication*)application
{
application.idleTimerDisabled = YES;
}

- (void)turnLightOn
{
AVCaptureDevice* captureDevice = [AVCaptureDevice defaultDeviceWithMediaType:AVMediaTypeVideo];

if ([captureDevice hasTorch])
{
[captureDevice lockForConfiguration:nil];
[captureDevice setTorchMode:AVCaptureTorchModeOn];
[captureDevice unlockForConfiguration];

if (captureDevice.torchMode!=AVCaptureTorchModeOn)
[self turnLightOn];
}
}

@end

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
@autoreleasepool
{
return UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, NSStringFromClass([FastFlashlightApplicationDelegate class]));
}
}

I’m sure there’s going to be that person who feels compelled to comment about how the code can be improved/made cleaner/etc. I’m preemptively just going to say that the compiler optimizes that out or whatever.

Doesn’t iOS 7 have a flashlight?

And doesn’t that make this app pointless in a few weeks when it’s out? Nah. In the same way that we get a bunch of emails from Camera+ users thanking us for including the zoom feature that Apple “removed” in the standard Camera app, there’ll still be people searching for a flashlight app.

With the camera zoom, Apple made it much less obvious than it used to be that there’s a zoom feature in their camera app. So, many people don’t even know that the feature exists. Likewise, I’m willing to bet that a lot of iOS 7 users won’t even know about the Control Center, which is where the flashlight exists (similarly to how most iPhone users don’t know of the current multitasking tray… or that swiping right reveals more controls). Besides, a single tap of the app icon to turn on the light is quicker than a swipe and tap when you really need a light.

Free for a day!

We’re launching Fast Flashlight now and making it free for today only. Grab it now!

Special thanks go out to Corwin and Karl for helping get this out.

11 comments

Camera+ 3.9.2 is here for all the Amish / people from the future who walk among us

by John Casasanta

August 2, 201310 comments

I’m not sure who else would still be using iOS 5.1.1.

Anyway, Camera+ 3.9.2 just got approved. Here’s what’s up…

We’ve fixed a bunch of issues related to iOS versions from an era long past, like 5.1.1… and versions that don’t even exist yet. Welcome to the fuuuuuuuture!

Sigh.

10 comments

Camera+ 3.9.1 emergency iCloud sync bug fix

by John Casasanta

July 31, 201326 comments

We’re really not 100% positive about the hows and whys of it breaking, but in the just-released Camera+ 3.9, iCloud syncing broke. In any case, this quick update fixes it.

We apologize for any inconveniences and frustrations on your part. Now go and enjoy all the goodness that Camera+ 3.9(.1) brings…

iOS 5.1.1 holdouts: we just submitted a Camera+ fix that’ll get you up and running again. Please continue 1-starring it until it’s approved…

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id329670577?mt=8

26 comments

tasty bits for your iPhone

Clarity Pro

Straighten

Tint

Duotone

Soft Focus

Film Grain

Sharpen

Blur

Saturation

Temperature

Exposure

Brightness & Contrast

Highlights & Shadows

Vignette

Shooting refinements

iPhone wallpaper crops

A Tale of Two Dicks

New icons throughout the app

Shiny, new app icon

Say hello to Jack Hollingsworth

A little qualification

New unit categories, and units, and currencies

Other nice, new things

Exposure compensation

Square cropping

New sharing and printing options

Airdrop

Doesn’t iOS 7 have a flashlight?

Free for a day!