Last Saturday i wrote and submitted my first, personal app for the iPad. I had been long looking for a great idea, and the previous evening, while seeing my flickr-based screen saver play on the TV screen, i decided to create an app that shows off some of my photos on the iPad. I started experimenting that night, and did the real implementation the following morning.
While implementing the app did provide a few challenges (for example, it uses a unique way to react to screen rotation – when you turn your iPad around, the current image will not turn, and the image you are viewing will stay on screen exactly as it is. However, the orientation of the next image that is about to come on screen will adjust to the new device orientation), the result is a very a very simple (i ended up with less than 200 lines of written code), yet – i hope – beautiful application.
There’s no UI. no controls. Just pictures.
Once the application was finished and working, the real work began, and most of the time was spent selecting the right set of 90+ images from my photo library, all of which are included in the app in high 2048*x resolution, to look stunning on the iPad’s display.
Late last night, “Dwarfland Photos” was approved (after being “in review” for a ridiculously short amount of time), just in time to make Steve Job’s promise of “within 7 days”, and it is available on the App Store, now — i hope the one or other of you, dear readers, will decide to get a copy.
As time permits, i am planning to extend the application, in the future. For one, future updates will include new (and in many cases exclusive to the app) images. I will also play with the option for the app to automatically look for and download new images in the background, as they become available, as well as maybe to provide a few (hidden by default) controls to favorite and revisit images, or possible select images as wallpaper for your iPad lock or home screen.
Enjoy!
Hi Marc, this is great! I am just starting a part/spare-time transition from Delphi to Obj-C/Cocoa myself, and was interested to see what you could do in a few hundred lines. Very encouraging!
One quick question about the app itself – are you holding the images within the app at ‘high res’? I ask because one nice feature enhancement would be to be able to stop the slideshow, and pinch/zoom on an image. Obviously there’s not a lot of point in this if the images have been scaled down to fit the screen before inclusion in the program but if they’re stored as high res images then presumably there is more detail ‘to be seen’ in the picture if we zoomed in? Just a though, anyway.
I’m sure that if you blogged about your experiences getting to grips with iPad development, there are many of us who would find that interesting.
Cheers
Rob
Rob,
the images inside the app are 2048*x (x depending on aspect ratio, mostly around 1300). much bigger, and the iPad has memory problems displaying them “as is”. In the app, each image starts of scaled 1:1 in a random corner, and it then scaled won to fit the screen (with it’s smallest dimension) and centered on random position (along the wider dimension). iow, as the image starts out, you see it full resolution, once the animation is done, you see as much of it as possible.
the option to pause the slideshow and then pan and zoom around the current image is definitely on the list of things i wanna add.
i’ll definitely be blogging more about iPad and iOS development, so stay tuned!
ph – and if you like the app, be sure to leave a rating and review in the App Store!
thanx,
marc
What language did you use to develop the app? Prism with MonoTouch?
No it’s written in Objective-C and Xcode.