FAQ Snap Photo



A new section where I lay down the law.

Recently I have started receiving emails from a small group of gangsta wanna be's which have not only been an insult to the English language but have also started to threaten both myself and my family members (sometimes in graphic detail). THIS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. As of some years ago emailed threats are treated by law enforcement authorities as valid and serious and as such are regarded in the same light as if a threat had been made in person. In addition almost all Internet providers and email account providers have clauses in their EULA prohibiting this use.

Any emails I receive in the future involving threats against me or my family will result in the filing of a police report and me pressing whatever charges possible against the person/s in question.

Version Changelog

1.0.0 The initial version. Expect bugs.

1.0.1 Fixed spelling error. Captured camera key more efficiently.

1.0.2 Corrected some code in the app. Hopefully less crashes now. I have taken over 20 pictures with it in a row – keeping some deleting others and cant get it to force close.

1.0.3 Fixed problem with Detecting message never being removed. Fixed autofocus so pictures should be clearer.

1.0.6 New Features galore including Whitebalance, Effects, Anti banding (good for taking photos flouresant light), Nightmode – holds shutter open longer so more light gets in – better photos at night (needs steady hands). In addition you can now disable the stable detection in settings – just point and click. Disable shutter sound. When taking a photo with stability detect on Icon in top right shows you how much shaking is going on :). Everything should be fairly self explanatory. If you can work pretty much any other camera on other phones – you should be able to work this one.

1.0.7 Bug fixes. New Features: Allow focus to be set to normal (focus fires when pic is taken), turned off (Just point and click), Pre_Focus (only in non stable mode. Focuses BEFORE the event to take the photo is fired). There is now a small line of text under the indicator icon. These values represent your current settings in the following order

Focus Mode/Quality/White Balance Mode/Effect/NightShot Mode/AntiBanding Mode

The values should be fairly simple to work out – AU for White balance means Auto. SE for Effect means Sepia.

1.0.9 – 1.1.1 Bug fixes. Speed improvements to picture capture. Save and Discard menus now will work correctly. Hopefully fixed some of the force closing.

1.1.2 Rolled back a change to present menus immediately. Yes it made taking pictures faster but it made the app more unstable. Essentially when you take a photo it buffers that photo to the sdcard. You mess with that process and thats what makes it force close (Ie taking another photo while one is still deleting/buffering)

1.1.3 Small bugfix to fix progress circle not dismissing when you have no prompt set. Next version will have picture size selection and self timer.

1.1.4 Added Timer (0 value = no timer) Mode. Added picture size. Increased frame rate of preview so should be smoother.

1.1.6 Small bug fix. Focus beep now disabled when shutter sound disabled.

1.2.0 Added slide out settings to main screen.

Added ability to change settings from main screen.

Added new mode photobooth. Mode will take 6 pictures one after the other as fast as the camera is able.

Changed way images are saved resulting in faster pictures and faster return to pic taking if unhappy with shot and deleting.

Added license popup.

Sped up stability detection. Fixed MAJOR bug in it.

Removed pre-focus setting. Returned ability to use camera button half pressed to pre-focus. Button can then either be pushed the all the way or released to continue the photo taking process.

Disabled mapping to the camera button for starting SP (Please see force close section below)

Bugfixes.

1.2.1 Bugfixes to boothmode. Force close issues fixed.

Put a share button into the picture options. Had to kludge it but at least it will stop the endless stream of people emailing me because they havent read the faq and couldnt find it in the menu.

Fixed issue with no-prompt after capture not saving.

Other bugfixes.

1.2.2 Fixed crash when pushing camera button during save/discard

Fixed attachment name when sharing. .Jpg extension now added automatically

Pre-focus mode added back in as an option (personally I think using the half camera button to get a nice prefocus is better , but the masses have spoken.)

Picture no longer takes when releasing camera button from half pressed, was a good idea in concept not in practice.

Fixed crash when trying to change settings in middle of taking a photo (Why the hell you would want to do this I dont know, but someone did)

1.2.3 Re-arranged settings so that you dont have to scroll forever.

Changed filename format of the image file to YYYY MM DD HH mm ss instead of stupid default .

New Setting (Access from settings only) Prefix Mode. In this mode you can set text to be added to the front of your picture filename.

New Setting (Access from settings only) Override Camera Button – Checking this makes SnapPhoto the default camera app when the camera button is pressed.

Added ability to set the number of photos that photobooth will take (Access from settings only).

1.2.4 Bugfix for focus menu

1.2.6 Bugfix fixed images not saving from photobooth mode.

How to use app

For the most part anyone who has used a phone camera before will be able to use the app, there are a few exceptions.

The main screen shows two icons. One in the top left and one top right. The top right icon displays the current camera mode. Either two hands joined (stability mode) or A basic camera (Point and click – no stability detect). The icon on the left is a clickable button which when pressed will show a set of icons along the top of the screen. These icons represent the current settings for the camera. These icons will display for 4 seconds if untouched and then automatically hide. Pressing any of the icons within the row displayed will bring up a transparent listing of settings for that icon. This listing will automatically fade if untouched within 3 seconds. From the list the value of the clicked setting can be changed by scrolling and selecting. Once a selection is made the list will disappear, the icon will be updated to reflect the change and the new value will be applied.

Stability Mode: In this mode the camera is looking for a period of stability in order to take the photo. It can be used while standing stock still and holding the phone in a death grip, but it is better suited to situations where you may not be able to control your stability (such as in a car). Such situations now do not require you to hold the camera steady, focus half way with the button – then while still steady take the photo, all you need do now is tap either the dpad or camera button (NOTICE I SAID TAP NOT HOLD) and then manage 1 second of stability and the app will take the photo of that stable image.

Regular Mode: In this mode the camera is pure point and click. Again you do NOT need to hold either the camera or dpad button. Just tap either one to start the process and thats it.

Timer Mode: If set to a value other than zero the phone will enter timer mode. In this mode the phone will wait for the set time before taking the photo. At 3 seconds left the phone will start to beep letting you know to pose. The phone pre-focuses in this mode so snap should be quick after beep finishes.

PhotoBooth Mode: In this mode stability detect is automatically disabled. Camera will take a user set number (default 6) of photos one after the other (without focus, using camera button half way will pre-focus as normal). The shots will be taken as fast as the camera is able and will be taken using the small setting of picture size (This helps with speed). Once all six photos have been taken the user will be presented with a still shot showing the first picture and a save and discard button. User can then use a right or left slide of a finger on the screen to scroll through the pictures. Deleting/Saving an image will remove it from the previews and move the screen to the next image. The back button will result in discarding all images left in the preview list. Photobooth mode can be used in conjunction with timer mode (I expect this will be the most common use)

The section where I talk about Force Closes and Sdcard inserts.

Several people have complained about force closes of the app. This issue appears to be related to the format of the sdcard. Many of the sdcards are formatted using FAT. This is an OLD, slow POS Format that was never intended to handle large files, large bandwidth and long names – all of which snappphoto produce. To check if your card is FAT. Connect your G1 to a pc, touch the notification that appears and select mount. On your pc a new drive should appear – right click this drive and select properties.




Where it says File System it will either say FAT or FAT32 (In this case my card is FAT32). If your card is FAT chances are you are going to have problems. At this stage you may wish to format your card as FAT32. NOTE: THIS WILL REMOVE ALL DATA FROM YOUR SDCARD BACK IT UP FIRST, BACK IT UP FIRST, BACK IT UP FIRST. If you do not back it up first and send me email complaining that you lost all your coolz songz and shiz, I will simply point at you and laugh Nelson wise HA HA. Ok so now you have your data backed up you can format. To do so right click the drive letter and select format.




Choose settings similar to those above. In fact if you don't know what you are doing choose those exact settings. Hit start. It will chug away for a while (time depends on how large your sdcard is) and the present you with a shiny new empty sdcard. Copy your files back. Now you are all set to use SnapPhoto.

Many people have mentioned the issue regarding the message about having to insert an sdcard even when one is inserted. Thanks to some great users and a lot of restarting of g1's we have a root cause and solution have been found. The root cause appears to be corrupted thumbnails. When a picture is taken or the picture gallery is opened thumbnails are generated. Most of the time this is fine but as more and larger pictures are stored the thumbnails take longer to generate and anything that interrupts this process can cause the thumbnail database to become corrupted. A simple way to do this is press the back button repeatedly when the gallery is updating thumbnails. Once corrupted this will prevent the sdcard being set back to read/write status and this result in the message you see telling you to insert an sdcard (This is owing to how both my app and the regular camera app check for an sdcard). Powering down/up the phone will free the sdcard but only until the next time a thumbnail is generated (taking a picture/viewing gallery). Below is a fix that can be used to free the condition

  1. Power down phone completely. Hold down red phone button until menu is presented, choose power off option.

  2. Power on phone

  3. Download a file explorer from the market.

  4. Using the file explorer delete the following directory - /sdcard/dcim/.thumbnails. (Please note you can also do this by mounting your sdcard via a pc).

  5. SnapPhoto, camera and gallery should all now work. Please note entering the gallery will result in thumbnails being regenerated. Please allow this process to fully complete.

The section where I answer some questions about why my app doesnt have certain features.

Shutter Speed/Zoom: I am very limited in what I can make the camera do by the interface google provide me to the hardware. The are actually many many more things the camera can do - I just have no way of being able to call them - shutter speed, zoom, etc. Its possible google will open up the interface after January when they release their better camera app (supposedly) but I am using the latest version of their code with changes checked in to find all the things I am doing - and right now I am using everything they expose.

Why doesnt it have a flash. A flash is hardware. The day I can figure out how to put new hardware into a device via software is the day I can make Bill Gates and Steve Jobs my beoches. The G1 will NEVER have a flash unless someone can figure out how to open the device and hardwire one in.

Video Player: I have gotten many many requests for it,.Ok some news about cupcake. I just finished going through the source and here is what I can tell you. There will be video recording in the new app. The finally added the videosource stuff to the MediaRecorder lib. What I can also tell you is that all the new options I have added into the camera, they wont be in (at least not in source at this stage). If that is the case then rest assured as soon as the cupcake release comes out I will rewrite my app to take advatnage of the video stuff and also any new camera features they free up.

At this stage however I CANNOT write a video recorder - google simply have NOT exposed the methods I need to the SDK.

Why does the app have internet requirement. Because the app self checks for new versions it requires internet to essentially look at a remote file and see the version number in it. The easiest way to check this if paranoid is to put a packet sniffer on your network – connect the g1 to wifi and watch it send a URL request to snapphotoversion when it starts snapphoto.

Why cant your photobooth mode take pictures as fast as continuous shot.

Several reasons. The first is that that app does not actually take a picture as such. What it does is store an image of the currently displayed preview, as a result the images will never be as clear and resolutions will be extremely small in order to achieve any clarity.

Secondly the images are insanely small 72 pixels wide.

And now the part where I ask for Money.

If you like this app (or for that matter DroidFtp, WootChecker or StopWatchTimer) Please consider donating (even a small amount helps). This money will go towards buying me a development g1 which will lead to faster app development and debugging. It also helps me keep the apps from expiring at a certain date or not including all features etc.

http://thecrayonbox.org/donate.html

The part where I redirect haters and whiners to /dev/null

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_sink

General Questions/Comments Answered

  1. What does your app do? It takes photos based on when the phone is stable. It uses the built in accelerometer to detect when the phone is not moving and snaps the pictures

  2. You app looks like the normal camera. Much of the code is ripped right out of the camera app.

  3. Your attitude stinks and I hope you are beaten senseless with a raddish. I am giving away this software for free and despite what some people think it doesn't just magically write itself – it takes hours of coding and debugging. Added to that I paid 25 bucks for the privilege of being abused by people who either don't understand what the app is for or just like to abuse people. I have been incredibly disappointed in some of the comments on the market – not just for my apps but others. It makes it hard to be bothered to code up good apps. What keeps me going is the people who send me emails etc with suggestions or comments (some of which are even nice :)). Thanks!

  4. I am a l33t h@xor and will go Neo on you. Others have tried – they tried and failed – they tried and died..

  5. I have ideas that could make your app better. Please Please Please email them to peacock73@gmail.com. If they are even half way good chances are you will see them in the next release. Have an idea for a new app? Tell me, most of mine come from people requesting apps on the android boards.

  6. Why doesn't your app contain a flash player, Word processor and pleasure stimulus device. I guess I am just lazy. I have foolishly been spending every waking hour either working, coding, fixing bugs and occasionally seeing my wife and eating (sleep is for the weak). My only suggestion would be http://android.com download the SDK and get to work showing us how its done.

  7. We dont want this app we want a flash player. THEN WRITE IT YOURSELF!!!!!!. Seriously contact adobe – get them to give you the flash specs, which they never do, then get them to abandon the flash player they have already demonstrated for android, then learn java, download the SDK AND DO IT YOURSELF!!!. Failing that GO F**K YOURSELF.

  8. So what can we expect from SnapPhoto in the future. Make cars run on water, perpetual motion machine. Seriously though – check out the TODO at bottom of changelog.

  9. So what do pictures look like from SnapPhoto compared to regular camera

    http://picasaweb.google.com/ghoonk/SnapPhoto100#

  10. Doesn't Work. Wow thanks for that descriptive bug report. I will get right on debugging the issue using that technical data as a starting point.

  11. Y r u such a dik. See above.

  12. Why is there a delay between the photo being taken and the menu. Basically that delay is where the G1 is creating the image. If you save it it keeps that image if you delete it wipes it. Previously the menu showed up BEFORE the image was completed saving. Unfortunately the saving event is a locking event(it kind of has to be) and while it was writing the buttons wouldnt show presses. I cant really do much about this. I can make the buttons show earlier but they wont detect events until the same amount of time has passed. Personally I would prefer to look at a static shot of what I have taken and wait 1 second for the buttons.

A sample of the emails I have to deal with:

TODO:

Allow user to select amount of shake before camera will not take picture

Video?