Looking at a Dev

If you got to read my post on New Photography Editing Apps, you will know that the apps I chose to look at were all from small developers. The first app was by a developer called Shwetank Shivam. The developer visited the blog and sent me a link to the camera app that they made, and so I decided that I wanted to take a look at the camera app as well as some other apps made by this developer. Enjoy the post!

1. Pi Camera

This app was released on July 20th of 2020 and according to the Google Play Store. Since release, it has had over a thousand downloads (at this point). Below I have a screenshot of the camera app. This is the first great thing about this app for me. The Pixel 4a doesn’t allow screenshots in the default pixel camera app which is why I took no screenshots in all the posts done on the phone. This camera app does allow screenshots which is amazing!

I am writing this part of this post before a surgery in Cleveland, so I get to take advantage of being in a city and took a photo from the hotel. (You will be reading this two weeks after the surgery though)

As you can see, the app is very simple, it has zoom (bottom right), exposure (middle left) and other basic features. Below is a photo of an expanded menu. It gives you focus options including auto, infinity, macro, locked, and continuous. Above the focus options, you have flash options as well as a red eye feature. Below focus options there are options for standard photo quality, DRO, HDR, and a panorama mode.

Below is a screenshot of the rest of the settings. The camera lets you choose resolution, timer, options for taking multiple photos. There are some grid settings and white balance settings. That is basically it for the still photo portion.

Next I looked at some video settings. As you can see you can record in a variety of resolutions up to 4k (the max that the Pixel 4a can record in). Next there are speed settings. The speed settings go up to 240x which is crazy! The Google Camera app goes up to 120x but not any further. The rest of the settings are just like the still photo settings that I mentioned above.

I recorded in Cleveland using this 240x time-lapse function and when going through to edit the file, I saw that the file was named differently then files filmed through a default camera app. This was super useful for file organization. I apologize for the extremely random video clips. I am still recovering from surgery and can’t get outside right now. Most of the clips recorded took 15-25 minutes and ended up being as short as 3-5 seconds. It just shows how fast this time-lapse function is. Here is the vid below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Ohm_xRlas2nnnwwPqrOYcw2HEyssiv9/view?usp=sharing

Royalty free music from https://www.FesliyanStudios.com

One thing I saw in the video clips was a lot of grain. This was mainly in the first typing clip on the black keyboard. It is hard to know if this is just the small sensor in the Pixel struggling or not.

Improvements for the app

I think that more manual control options (focus especially) would improve this app as well as slow motion video. According to the Google Play Store, the app should have manual focus, but I couldn’t find it in the app. Since the app does so well at time-lapse I would love to see a slow motion option as well.

Overall

I really like this camera app. I have used quite a few mobile camera apps, but this one definitely isn’t the same as the others. I like that it has unique features that work well. The 240x video is definitely my favorite part of this app. I did a video comparison with this app against the Google Camera app after the video update and the recordings were no quality compromises. That is fantastic considering other camera apps can have video that isn’t as good as a phone’s default camera app.My other favorite feature is the macro mode. I didn’t look too much at this mode but from what I can see, it works very well. Here is an example photo from my hotel room:

I would recommend this camera app, and you can download it by clicking the link here. (I couldn’t find an IOS version of the app)

2. QR-Generator Pro – Create unlimited QR Codes

The next app from this developer is a QR Code generator app. QR codes are certainly not used as much as they use to be but often on the back of cards you will see a QR code from the card company. If you sell cards with your photography then a QR code linking to a website or social media might be useful. Below I have a screenshot of the app:

There are some ads, but it is not surprising considering that the other apps from this developer do not. Below I have a screenshot of a QR Code that I generated in the app:

As you can see, the app cuts off some words from where you type the text in. Also, if you want to scan it, it will take you to my Pinterest page which just passed 2k monthly views!

Below is another code that I generated in the app. It takes you to the blog’s homepage.

Overview of the App

I like the simplicity of the app. The two bugs that I found were minor. First, you saw above that words were cut off when typing in the URL to generate the QR code. Secondly, there is no way to export the QR code, so I had to do a screenshot instead. Overall the app is really nice, and I would recommend it as a simple tool to generate QR codes. Unlike other QR code generators though, you cannot do any custom designs to generate the code.

You can visit it on the Google Play Store here.

3. ASCII CAM – Code Your Life

This final app that I am checking out is very interesting. What the app does is converts photos to code. Here is an example:

The app has quite a few bugs. First, the button to take a photo just crashes the app, the same with trying to import a photo to convert. I really don’t see any useful aspect to this app apart from using it just to see the world around you differently. I like the concept. I could certainly see using this to take unique photos just for a bit of fun.

Download it on the Google Play Store here.

Conclusion

I hope that you enjoyed this blog post! I would definitely recommend the camera app to most people, although I think that it is an app limited to Android users. The camera app was the focus of this post and the other two apps were clearly for a niche audience but if you found those apps interesting, be sure to go and check them out.

Thank you so much for reading! I’d love to hear from you in the comments and I would like to give a big shoutout to Shwetank Shivam for creating these apps.

-Digital Wonders & Smiles