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Introducing the new Snapchat

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Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#31

Post by stickydink »

distantsounds wrote: post #6

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage. And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where…

I worked on an app that we needed to take a live video stream, run that through OpenCV, but also quickly take high-res photos while that's running.

On Android I really had trouble in getting the preview stream to line up with the photographs. I needed to keep the preview resolution low enough that devices could process it and present to the screen in real time. But not all devices have the same preview and photograph resolutions.

I found there were inconsistencies between the way the image was cropped (on the OS/hardware level) between different resolutions.

You can take a preview stream at resolution X, and it would appear full frame. Then you would take a photograph at resolution Y, and despite being the same aspect ratio, it would be cropped differently. The results varied between devices, with some matching the crop, some vertically, some horizontally, and (as far as I could tell) there was no way to identify programmatically how the camera was doing the cropping. It seemed to be being done at a level much lower than I could access.

In the end we just had to compromise on a resolution in the middle and use it for both preview and photo.

It may not be the reason, and maybe there's a way around this, the project was a year or two since now. Implementing the same thing on iOS I didn't run into the issue.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#32

Post by econner »

distantsounds wrote: post #6

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage. And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where…

My impression was that they did this because it made taking a picture faster than using the camera and they specifically did not want to encourage high quality photos. They wanted quick personal moments where you don't care so much how you look or capturing the perfect lighting or whatever.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#33

Post by icholy »

yojex wrote: post #11
distantsounds wrote: post #6

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage. And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where…

Snapchat takes beautiful photos on iOS. Some people I know even prefer to use it to the native camera. I wonder why this is different for Android? Does anyone have an insight here?

People prefer to use it because it shows you the mirrored picture which you're more used to seeing.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#34

Post by xspade »

distantsounds wrote: post #6

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage. And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where…

I always thought this was to ensure you get a photo of what you're seeing in the moment; not something after a delay which is what was happening with older phones. Essentially it's a fast and dirty way for the photos to be WYSIWYG and avoid camera lag.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#35

Post by anant90 »

Teenagers, and for that matter, everyone yearns for smaller private spaces where they can share whatever they want with their closest friends — without any reservations of judgement from their parents, grandmas or uncles. I used to love Instagram, until Facebook decided to make it Facebook v2 by making my entire "friend" list follow me there as well. That means that until I invest a lot of time hiding my story from everyone but my closest friends (and of course no one has time for that), I'll just refrain from posting some of my true self there.

On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.

I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#36

Post by rjpr »

smcl wrote: post #26
grenoire wrote: post #17

Wait, what's even different? Serious question.

I guess that under the hood there are modes the camera can operate in - lower-res "video" mode and a high-res "still" mode. When you're looking at the viewfinder it's kind of a video - so it'll be lower res and presumably will skip some corrections involved when a still is taken. Edit: oops I thought this was in reply to a comment where someone complained that the photo was taken from a screenshot of the viewfinder i…

Where are you getting this from? Unless I missed something all they're doing is moving around the menus a bit.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#37

Post by vlunkr »

therealmarv wrote: post #23

Is this thing still a total bandwidth hog and downloading all snaps in alphabetical order instead the videos I want to see? This app was unusable in countries with low bandwidth like e.g. the Philippines. This is why Instagram wins... Instagram is really really great engineering and testing. I would even say it's one of the best optimized mobile apps out there.

My experience with Instagram has not been that great. Videos don't play reliably, and when they do, it's a gamble if the audio will work or not.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#38

Post by distantsounds »

tartuffe78 wrote: post #30
distantsounds wrote: post #6

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage. And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where…

As a near daily snapchat user, and someone who has developed an Android app that use's the camera, I prefer it this way. I'm not using SnapChat to take super high quality pictures, but to share moments quickly. The WYSIWYG works well for that, and a lot of Android devices are super slow to take pictures. Dealing with Camera 1 vs Camera 2 Android APIs, and device specific issues is a mess, I don't blame them for takin…

So you prefer gimping your photo quality because you're too lazy to learn how the API works, and assume that your users are OK with this as well?

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#39

Post by gnodar »

therealmarv wrote: post #23

Is this thing still a total bandwidth hog and downloading all snaps in alphabetical order instead the videos I want to see? This app was unusable in countries with low bandwidth like e.g. the Philippines. This is why Instagram wins... Instagram is really really great engineering and testing. I would even say it's one of the best optimized mobile apps out there.

Go to settings->manage and toggle Travel Mode on.

Re: Introducing the new Snapchat

#40

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

distantsounds wrote: post #6

Android's Camera API has existed for _literally years_ to take high-quality photos and these guys are still just taking a screenshot of the viewfinder and calling it a day. It's been like this forever and Snap has refused to fix this. I have yet to come across any other app on Android that utilizes the camera this way. The photos are complete garbage. And here they are, trying to add more 'features' into an app where…

As much as I love to hate on Snapchat, there's probably no reason to use the Camera API for high quality pictures given Snapchat's use case. And if your nudes were going to be leaked would you rather they were blurred or high-res?
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