Interview With the Creator of Snapture

Interview With the Creator of Snapture

Interview With the Creator of Snapture

ss02.jpg Last week saw the launch of Snapture 2.0, an application which takes the iPhone and makes its camera into something other than an embarrassing afterthought.

As we saw last week, Snapture is an application which takes the iPhone's camera and adds all sorts of goodies: a burst mode for motordrive-style shooting, a self timer, a 3x digital zoom activated by pinching the image and a "Thumbnail Stack", for quickly viewing and deleting images on the fly. In short, all the things that Apple should have included from the beginning.

The trouble is, you need to jailbreak your iPhone to run it: Snapture is not available at the iTunes App Store.

Even so, Snapture is selling well. We spoke to Snapture Labs founder Bowei Gai about why Jailbreaking is still relevant, and why the iPhone camera isn’t as bad as everyone thinks.

Gadget Lab: Why a camera application? Won’t Apple fix things up itself one day?

Bowei Gai: We don’t think of Snapture as just another camera application that makes a small incremental improvement. Snapture is the inflection point where your mobile phone can truly become your everyday digital camera. The difference is night and day. This isn’t just an improvement for camera phones rather this is something that all digital cameras in general should implement to improve the photo taking experience. It’s a new and better way of doing things.

Apple might make some changes to their stock Camera application down the line but for now it really doesn’t seem to be a priority for them. Besides adding geotag information, there were no other changes for the 2.0 firmware. While there is definitely some elegance in simplicity, we think that you can have your cake and eat it too.

GL: Both versions of Snapture require a jailbroken iPhone to run. That was necessary on the first one, but now, why not an official application?

BG: This is a question we get at least 20 times a day from people all over the world. Of course we would love to bring Snapture to the App Store and we hope that it’s a possibility one of these days. That being said, it’s simply not our choice to make. If we were to play by the rules and only use the Apple approved Camera frameworks, Snapture would actually be worse than the stock camera app. We’re on a mission to improve mobile photography and we’re not going to limit ourselves to only the iPhone.

GL: Both the physical camera and the camera software in the iPhone are widely regarded to be junk. You have hinted that you disagree. Can you elaborate?

BG: If that’s true, doesn’t it make you wonder what people think of camera in phones in general? We think that the iPhone is a great foundation for mobile photography. It has the largest screen out of any camera phone with multi-touch based control, and the ability to instantly share photos whenever, wherever. In general, while the iPhone camera application is quite basic, the experience is still good enough to make it the most popular camera phone out there. Let’s take a look at the number of mobiles photos uploaded on to Flickr yesterday by the top 5 camera phones:

iPhone: 15760

N85: 7135

N73: 2968

K800i: 3148

N82: 1820

The number of photos taken with an iPhone is greater than the sum of the rest of the competition. Apple managed to build the world’s most useful camera phone but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

GL: Is there a future for other “unofficial” applications? Who will bother with the cat and mouse game of Jailbreaking when it’s so easy to just download apps that work?

BG: Most definitely. As long as there are limitations on the iPhone SDK there will always be a demand for unofficial apps. Frankly, apps in the jailbroken space are far more sophisticated than App Store apps. Peer to peer file sharing, video recording, and games such as Quake all require jailbroken iPhones. Jailbreaking is often portrayed negatively in the public but it really shouldn’t be. Jailbreaking your iPhone is akin to adding aftermarket performance parts to your Honda Civic. Just ask some of the Apple employees from WWDC who were rocking jailbroken iPhones at some of the after parties.

AppStore has definitely made downloading apps a breeze, but one could almost argue it’s just as easy to jailbreak your iPhone nowadays. The jailbreak community has come a long way since its early days. Now you can run the jailbroken apps along with the app store apps, why choose when you can get the best of both world.

GL: What about all the iPhone NDA business — is that a big barrier for you?

BG: The iPhone SDK NDA definitely reduced the collaboration in the developer community. People keep their code private and don’t directly talk about ways of doing things in the SDK. That being said, there’s a lot of people who kind of see the NDA as a bit of a farce. Now that the AppStore is online, it’s not clear what Apple is trying to protect? If the NDA is lifted there will probably be some more creative apps cropping up. Apple is really just hurting itself in our opinion.

Product page [Snapture]