Pic Paint cross 1 million downloads !!!

After years of developing, bug fixes and user feedback, we are very proud to announce this huge milestone.

THANK YOU to all of our users around the world who have made this possible.  Particular thanks to all of our great community members in Japan and the United States!

皆さんありがとうございます！

 

New app updates

So back in February we did major updates to all of our apps on the Google Play store.  In fact, Pic Paint was rebuilt from the ground up with a ton more features.  We hope you are all enjoying the apps!

Front Facing Camera support & Macro

For those of you with new fancy phones with two cameras, our apps now support front facing cameras!  Also if your phone supports macro focus, you now have a new option to cycle through on the focus button.

It’s taken us a while to get these new features into your hands, but enjoy!

Droid X & Droid 3 focus issues

Our great users on Droid X & Droid 3 phones have been telling us about focus problems.  It seems our friends at Motorola have treat focusing different on these phones and we are not sure why!

A fix to the problem is to leave your focus mode on infinity – a white AF symbol.  This will allow your camera to always be focused on the subject between 2 and 1000 ft away.  If closer than 2 ft, use the macro focus setting.  Yellow AF on these phones doesn’t work.

 

AF and autofocus on our camera app

We recently got the following question from one of our users:

“I recently purchased this app from the Android Market. Im noticing that each time I press on the focus icon, the screen on my phone disappears for a second. Is there a way to turn this off?”

This was a recent change we had to make to ensure the app is stable.  It is actually resetting the camera for that split second.

If you hit AF and it is yellow – it is active.  All pictures from then on will cycle the focus and it will be properly focused.

Basically leave it on AF yellow/active and you don’t have to hit it again.  You can even set Autofocus to always be yellow/active in the preferences so each time the app starts it is always active.

AF off/gray is for no focus. This means that the camera snaps pictures quicker because there is no autofocus cycle, however they will always be focused “at infinity”.  Basically anything over 10 ft away will be focused correctly, but less than 10 ft away it could be blurry.

Samsung Nexus S and Digital Zoom

So here at Popcrowd we have a lot of phones for testing purposes.  Our favorite right now is the Nexus S from Samsung.  Funny thing about this phone however is it has NO digital zoom built in.  Not only that, but the Android OS reports that zoom is simply not supported on this phone.  What does that mean?  The stock Android Camera app has no zoom capabilities and also our apps have no zoom either. I mean come on Google and Samsung – give us a break!

Using this phone as my own personal device I find this very bothersome. That means we will figure out a way to get zoom working on the phone – give us some time.  We’re not happy 🙂

 

Our recent ratings – an explanation

Update Jan 5/2011 – Our latest update v2.05 seems to have fixed these issues.  If you are having any troubles after updating, please email us at     blog (at) popcrowd.com

Recently we have been getting some lower ratings on our camera apps from our great users.  Specifically it happened with Droid and EVO owners over the past month.

We are happy to report that we are well on the way to fixing the issue with our Camera apps and hope to have a fix out by the end of this week Dec 31. We will be fixing the app hanging and crashing issue that many of you have been reporting.

For those interested, the problem occurred because as these phones upgraded to Android v2.2 Froyo, they got much faster.  This new found speed then led to camera threads clashing and crashing.  We got it almost fixed though!

As always drop us an email anytime. Click the ‘Contact Developer’ from the Android market page or from within your app’s preference page.

Thanks for your patience!

Samsung Galaxy S and Droid v2.2

Over the past week we have done some small tweaks to PRO Zoom Camera to ensure it works on these phone models.  We have fully tested our app on both phones with good results.  Please send us an email from the “Preferences” section of our app if you have any problems!

 

Happy snapping!

 

Samsung Vibrant/Galaxy & EVO Froyo – Fixed!

We have done an app update that fixed the problems that our PRO Zoom Camera 5X app was having with EVOs and Samsung Galaxy S/Vibrant/Captivate phones.

Thanks for your patience as we try to stay ahead of the massive number of OSes and phones in the Android world.

Cyanogen, rooted ROMs and the challenges

Developing a camera app for all Android phones isn’t easy.  Each manufacturer tends to slightly tweak the camera, the gallery and their parameters ever so slightly.  We test our apps against many different phones models but there is only so much testing we can do.

Recently our app updates have given even more features to our users – this is good!  However these updates have made it much harder to support phones running ROMs.  We have had a few cases of our app crashing repeatedly on rooted ROM phones like Cyanogen.  We will try to support these ROMS as best we can, but we cannot be perfect.  These ROMs add ALOT of complexity when trying to test and support them – basically they are NON-standard Android.
In short, if your are running a ROM and our apps behave badly, email us and let us know.  We will try our best to support ROMs but our focus it on the main standard Android users (Cupcake, Froyo, Gingerbread, etc).

If you are a ROM developer – follow Android standards for your camera parameters – please!

Update: We just tested our app running Cyanogenmod 6.0 on a Dream phone and it worked well!  Email us if your hard core Android ROM folks have any problems with our apps.