I Want a Hot Apple Pie, Not Just an Apple - by Martin Aggett
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 2:00PM | Glyn Evans I love the entrepreneurial spirit that surrounds the AppStore. It’s a place where just about anyone can call themselves a developer, learn some Objective-C, and publish an application for an audience of millions of potential users. It seems the idea of collecting millions of dollars, ninety-nine cents at a time, is a huge draw for a lot of people. I don’t want to discourage anyone from shooting for the stars, or reaching for the brass ring, or any other cliché you can think of for wanting to accomplish big things, but I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the AppStore.
"The prefereces screen, really?"There seems to be a slew of applications that aren’t anything more than technology demos or single-function features that try to fill some void left by the iPhone’s operating system. While some of these ninety-nine cent apps do stand on their own merits, many are just alpha or beta versions masquerading as full utility applications. Which brings me to ReplayCam…
The developers of ReplayCam, like a few others in the photography category, are trying to skirt Apple’s restrictions on using the iPhone’s camera to capture full motion video to give you a “video-like” experience. ReplayCam accomplishes this by turning on the iPhone’s camera and capturing screen shots of what the camera sees at set intervals (0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, and 3 seconds) and then saving those images (between 5-25) in one image in your iPhone’s Camera Role. You can then play back the individual frames at differing speeds to simulate a flipbook-style “movie”.
"Simple five-second animations are easy and fun"I had fun playing with this app during my recent layover in Salt Lake City on my way to an assignment in Colorado Springs. I made a movie of random people scurrying around the terminal, a stop-motion animation of a salt shaker, and even got creative with PhotoFX’s pencil filter and recreated a scene from A-ha’s music video Take on Me. Would you like to see them? Well you can’t unless you buy your own copy of ReplayCam. This is where we start talking bad about the app so stop reading if you’re accustomed to living in a world filled with puppies and sugar plum fairies.
ReplayCam doesn’t create true videos in a format that can be easily shared. I ran into a ton of obstacles when I tried sharing my “video masterpieces” with my only friend Glyn. Once you get past the hurdle of making your friends buy this app so they can see your “movies”, you have to send them the 1600x2000 image that ReplayCam creates. My first thought was to send it as an attachment using Apple’s email software but remembered that Apple resizes your images before sending them. So then I used the app SendPhoto which claims to be able to send full resolution images via email – they lied. Even using several different apps to upload the image to Flickr resulted in a resized image that was unusable when trying to play it back in ReplayCam. I finally downloaded the image from my phone onto my laptop and emailed a full resolution file which worked. This app should have an easy way of sharing my movies, in a universal format, which any of my friends (Glyn) can view without having to buy ReplayCam, and I should be able to do it all from my iPhone.
"Getting creative with post-processing app PhotoFX"ReplayCam is like an apple, and I like eating an apple every once in a while. [If you were wondering when the title of this review was going to make any sense now is the time to start paying attention] When I eat an apple I’m generally satisfied, but my expectations going into the whole experience are pretty low. I’ve never gotten a wild craving for an apple or found my mouth watering at the thought of one. Now picture a hot, homemade Dutch apple pie with a sugar-crusted lattice crust and a scoop of French bean vanilla ice cream nuzzled up next to it. That’s something I can get excited about! ReplayCam – ehh, not so much.
Martin Aggett is a freelance photojournalist who is currently accepting applications for new friends. If you’re into photography, iPhone dev, geek culture, or travel you’ve got something in common with Martin.
Reader Comments (1)
Martin, I agree 100% with this review. At first ReplayCam looks an interesting app, but you soon find out that it has very limited usability, due to the inability to share the "flipbook-style" movies. If this app had the ability to share its movies in a similar way to QuadCamera, then this app may well give QuadCamera a run for its money in this niche category.