My photography portfolio app. Opinions?

Hello all,

I’m working on an app to show my photos. I’m at a point where the basics are working relatively well, so I thought I’d post here and see what you guys think.

The app has basically three views: A first, top list of photo albums, an album view for each album, and an individual photo view. In general, you go in with one tap and return with a double tap.

The layout, and all the photos are downloaded as the app runs. You should be online when you try this. One of the albums is my photoblog, in which I post a photo per day, and which updates accordingly.

I used Gister to upload it here:

https://gist.github.com/5771498
(edited to fix a bug–thanks @Briarfox and @Zoyt for finding it)

Gister doesn’t preserve the tab order. The tabs should be Main,Photo,Album,View2D,Galleries,Photoblog,JSON. Just reorder them in that way.

and this is a video I made of it working:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8jFSJsA7sM

Keep in mind some things if you want to try it:

  • It will fill your “Documents” sprite folder with relatively high res images. You can always delete them after of course.
  • It might have trouble on the ipad 1. I believe this is because of the little memory the original ipad has. I’m developing it on my ipad 3, my ipad 1 keeps crashing if I try to run it.

Things I plan to do:

  • somehow check for the status of the internet connection, and warn the user if offline
  • ship the final app with the first images of each album, and perhaps very low res versions of every photo
  • do something about the transitions into and out of albums
  • maybe implement a downloading queue for the images, the way it is now I believe some crashes might be because of too many http requests open
  • make ALL the layout come from a json file served from my site. Right now the layout is an ad hoc text file
  • do better error checking

Anyway. I’ll be happy if some of you want to tr it and give me your opinion.

Thanks!

j

Thanks!

If its of any use, I’ve blogged an example of queued picture downloading here

http://coolcodea.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/62-3d-downloading-images-on-demand/

Thanks Ignatz. Yes, your article there was exactly hat I had in mind when I said that :slight_smile:

Wow. Nice job. I couldn’t get it to run (due to tab order), but from the video, it looks amazing.

@Zoyt darn, sorry about that. Forgot that Gister doesn’t preserve tab order.

The tabs should be Main,Photo,Album,View2D,Galleries,Photoblog,JSON.

I’ll edit the first post now reflecting that.

@juanbuhler You should check out autogist, it preserves tab order. Cool looking app. I’m going to play with it now.

I am unable to get it working with the correct tab order. btw AutoGist creates an installer. it makes it a lot easier for people without gister to load the project.

Still having issues with line 40 of Photoblog trying to index global “obj”.

@zoyt i have the same error.

I’m sorry guys. My error checking should be better, the script was calling the parse functions on an empty file. I didn’t catch this because I’ve had a file saved as local data for a while.

I believe I fixed it now:

https://gist.github.com/5771498

@Briarfox, yes, I need to check out AutoGist.

Sorry about that!

That fixed it. Cool app and beautiful photography! However, im getting slow load times and crahses on my ipad2.

Wow… I didn’t realize how amazing an app this was from the video. It feels clean and doesn’t usually lag. The only time it has lagged is when it finishes loading a photo and is about to display it.
REALLY nice job!

@Briarfox I will have to see what the deal is with the ipad 1 and 2. One idea is to deliver the app with low res versions of the images, so the wait is less annoying. Maybe I could also serve lower res images for the non-retina ipads.

@Zoyt Thanks! Frankly I think parts of the code are still a bit of a mess, I’m improving it slowly. Don’t know what to do about that lag, I think it has to be an i/o thing… I think if Codea supported writing jpegs that part would be faster.

@juanbuhler - You might suggest turning this into a library, then other photographers can use it.

That would be awesome!

@Zoyt Interesting idea. I’m assuming you mean the part that takes a bunch of images and shows them as a tiled gallery.

It’s doable, although right now I’m focusing on making a presentation app for my photos. I’d have to really clean up the parsing I do right now (which is a bit of a mess, frankly!) and try to really generalize everything…

Something to think about. Thanks for trying it!

Bump on this.

Anybody want to help me beta test it? I have it on TestFlight. If you’re interested, message me with your email address and I’ll add you to the list.

Thanks!

Here is the Testflight link:

http://tflig.ht/16GdIdl

Planning to upload a new build tomorrow or Monday…