It’s that time of the year again, when Apple releases a major new firmware upgrade for the iPhone and scores of iPhone users hit the Update button in iTunes. It’s also the time when iOS developers scramble to test their apps on the new version of the operating system and push out updates to fix anything that may have broken.
Although usually that just means tweaking a few lines of code here and there to optimize things or not having to do anything at all, the scope and enormity of the new features that iOS 4.0 brings have a much deeper impact on the fundamental architecture of some of the underlying elements that we developers use in our apps.
This posting is intended to make you aware that, as of their most recent versions available in the App Store today, Camera Plus and its older sibling Camera Plus Pro are not very friendly to iOS 4.0. We have been testing the apps out on iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS units here in the secret underground bunkers that form the Global Delight headquarters and working furiously to make it play nice with the new OS on the block.
The Problems
• An extra helping of zoom: You know how Camera Plus Pro gives you a zoom slider to allow you to capture that tiny butterfly that seems just a little out of reach? With iOS 4.0, Camera Plus and Camera Plus Pro customers who upgrade to the new OS on existing iPhones (and those who purchase the iPhone 4, presumably) will find two zoom sliders, one overlaid on top of the other. While that does quadruple the amount of zooming our apps will now allow you to do, the outcome is not exactly pleasing to the eye.
• Displacement of sharing: Customers who upgrade to iOS4 will find that the screens that allow you to enter details when sharing images are displaced when the keyboard is put away. It’s not pretty but, hey, it works.
• So many tasks, so little time: Needless to say, all pre-iOS 4.0 apps, including ours, were designed without multi-tasking in mind. With iOS 4.0, your applications keep running in the background in a nascent state, even if its main feature is one that does not work in the background (like, say, taking a picture). Therefore, if you press the Home button while Camera Plus Pro is clicking away in burst mode, waiting for the timer to get done or uploading media, it gets downright confused about what it should do and clams up. You’ll have to quit it from the multi-tasking dock and relaunch it to nurse it back to full health.
• The great video meltdown: If you have Camera Plus Pro configured to use the default Apple-supplied video capture UI and try to use it after upgrading to iOS 4.0, you’ll experience something you do not expect from a high quality application like ours: a crash. We are deeply apologetic about the fact that this bug exists. While the others on this list are problems we couldn’t have foreseen, this particular one could have been avoided, at least in theory.
The Solution
We’ve been working sixteen-hour days ever since we realized that these problems would rear their ugly heads for Camera Plus and Camera Plus Pro customers upgrading to iOS 4.0 and will be submitting a version with all the necessary fixes for the latter within a couple of days. We’ll also get an updated version for Camera Plus out there as soon as possible. We expect Camera Plus Pro version 2.4 to be out in the App Store before the end of June and Camera Plus version 2.2 to follow soon thereafter.
The Recommendation
If you cannot live without Camera Plus Pro for a second and the idea of going up to a week without it is enough to give you nightmares, we request you not to upgrade to iOS 4.0 until we’ve released the updates, which will make them as compatible as a pair of nesting penguins! We suspect there may be some other developers out there as well whose apps may be caught in the cross-hairs of iOS 4.0 and its whiz-bang features and your holding out for a week will give them a chance to bring their apps up to speed as well.
As for those of you who cannot wait an extra second to get onto the iOS 4.0 bandwagon and multi-task till your precious iPhone 3GS begs for mercy, we recommend that you not press the Home button while the app is in the middle of something and set it up to use our custom video recording interface if you have it set otherwise (you’ll also get to use our excellent video filters as an added bonus). We realize that this is not ideal but, at the moment, it’s the best we can do.
The Future
All the problems we have outlined here and the steps we are taking to solve them pertain to iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS users. However, we have no way to test our applications on the iPhone 4 yet and cannot predict with any certainty what additional problems, if any, they will exhibit on the new hardware. Once it is released, we will have an iPhone 4 in our hands as soon as it’s possible to do so and will get cracking on optimizing our apps for it as well.
We hope that you’ll bear with us while we tirelessly work to get these issues fixed and we look forward to your continued patronage. As always, if you encounter any other bugs in the Camera Plus apps, we encourage you to drop us a line via email.
-Aayush
Camera Plus, Camera Plus Pro
apple, Camera Plus, Camera Plus Pro, iOS 4.0, iTunes, Video recording
