The Breakroom

Behind the BitCam

June 29, 2016

By Ged Maheux

The folks over at The Apple Google interviewed me about BitCam, how the app came about and what went into bringing it to the App Store. There’s some fun insights in the discussion that are worth checking out like the specific challenges we faced when developing the retro camera for your “mini pocket computer”:

One challenge was the nature of today’s hardware with retina displays. Pixels are so small these days that they can’t be seen by the naked eye and so to make an app like BitCam where everything was pixellated and chunky took some planning and additional time. Also, today’s hardware is so fast that animation transitions can be nearly instantaneous, but obviously this wasn’t the case back in the day so we intentionally built in “slowness” into some portions of the app like the Super-Res view. When you pan your camera around, the display doesn’t update at 60fps, it does so in a “chunky” manner to help convey what it might have been like to have such a pocket camera back then.

BitCam has been receiving lots of great reviews from users and we couldn’t be happier with its reception. You can check out the entire interview over at The Apple Google, learn more about the app over on the BitCam home page or download it for free from the App Store.