Tech Tuesday: Building a Custom Camera Experience

In a few short weeks we’ll be rolling out an all new post creation experience with nenos 2.2. Our top priorities for the new experience are — in no particular order:

• Quick access to the camera and your recent photos

• Improved filters and photo editing tools

• Better feedback about the upload process (especially if things go wrong)

Essentially, our goal here is to make it waaay easier to create and edit directly inside of nenos.

Quick Camera & Photos Access

The first order of business in revamping our creative experience was to make access to the camera much faster. Now, when you tap on the Create tab, the camera immediately slides up and opens in full screen. By writing our own custom camera implementation we reduced the amount of overhead required by the system camera app, while retaining many of the features customers have come to expect.

The camera features custom gestures for zooming and flipping the camera backed by the system's multitouch gesture recognizers. Slide your finger up or down to zoom in or out, respectively. Or try pinching / panning your fingers to change the zoom level. Double tap to flip the camera.

If you've ever used Snapchat or Instagram's cameras, you'll feel right at home here. Notice that your most recent photo is shown on the bottom leading corner of the screen. Tap on your recent photo to select from a beautifully-laid-out grid of all your most recent photos.

Once you've captured a photo or chosen one that you've already taken, you'll be able to edit captions, locations, filters, and crop before posting.

Adjustments to Filters & Editing Tools

We've adjusted the filters (LUTs) in our editing tools for more natural looking results. Additionally, we've dialed back some of the effects from certain editing tools (such as the smoothing tool, which was overzealous in its quest to remove details).

We'd love to hear more from any of you who already have photo editing workflows on what you need, and what you'd like to see from us that might make your workflows easier.

Better Feedback About Uploads

Uploading your photo is super important! So we've been working on improving error feedback, tweaking our machine learning models, and giving you more visibility into what's happening as you upload.

When there's an issue during upload you'll now see much more descriptive reasons for the failure. Those descriptions are now shown with suggested actions on how to fix the problem (or contact us if it keeps happening).

Our machine learning models are now also slightly better at detecting profanity and NSFW-content in uploads before they even reach the internet. All ML processing is done 100% on-device, and nothing gets uploaded if it's flagged.

As your photo uploads (if it's taking a while) you'll also now be able to exit the app to do other things -- and you'll be notified when it finishes.

That's it for now. Check back soon for more technical deep dives.