Early last year I bought myself an iPhone, to see what iOS is really like. By that I mean to see what the quality of iOS apps are compared to Android’s. One of the apps that I really liked during that time was Facebook’s Camera app, which was the inspiration for photup. Another reason I created photup was that it had been a while since I created something, at the time I was working on agency apps and I wanted to keep myself ‘fresh’.
Fast forward six months to now, and I’m happy with the results. Over 80,000 downloads with an average rating of 4.4, without being mentioned, featured or anything like that. With my personal development time now becoming more limited, I need to start cutting projects, and the first of these is photup.
So photup is now open source, released under the Apache v2 licence. So ye, happy hacking.
Code Quality#
There a few ‘gems’ in the source. I’ve listed a few here:
- Photos Tag which scale and pan with the photo (see PhotoTagItemLayout.java)
- The uploading Service is solid (see here).
- The Uploads Action Bar item, which is displayed on large screens (see UploadsActionBarView.java).
In any application, there are always bits of the code which you would want to improve. Here are the ones in photup:
- Database operations. It was added after everything else, and was ‘hacked’ in.
- Use of AsyncTasks for most network operations (other than uploading). This was just because I was being lazy.
- Lack of documentation or comments in the code. Again, me being lazy.