It appears that a week later Apple has approved our second application, “Light My Way”. It’s free!
At the moment it’s very simplistic but we will be adding a large number of enhancements as usual 🙂
Category Archives: iPhone
"Light My Way" submitted to App Store, along with Live Cams 4.7 and 1.7 HD
We’ve just submitted new versions of Live Cams and Live Cams HD to Apple for review. These releases resolve all known display bugs in the previous version and introduce some new graphics to further enhance the look and feel of the app.
We have also spent some time working on a brand new application called “Light My Way”. As you can probably guess, it’s another flashlight app! This particular application uses licensed graphical backgrounds to show different scenes while allowing simple taps to activate or deactivate the LED flash on iPhone 4 devices. The first release includes 4 different scenes and is fairly simplistic. As we do with our Live Cams products we will continue to enhance and release free upgrades for all customers who purchase the app.
The app will be free for a few days initially (when approved) so be sure to grab a copy before it becomes a paid app. We will be adding a large number of customization features in the future so you will be sure to see some great functionality as time goes on!
Live Cams 4.7 undergoing testing
We have had a fantastic response to the latest 4.6 and 1.6 releases of the Live Cams product line. We are approaching the two-year anniversary of the creation of Live Cams and we are very excited to see that it is still a very popular app in the iTunes App Store. Currently Live Cams is in the top 100 paid apps in the UK.
That doesn’t mean we rest! We have been busy with our usual bugfixes and enhancements and are performing our last few days of testing on the 4.7 and 1.7 releases.
Live Cams 4.7 and Live Cams HD 1.7 contain a number of significant enhancements, including:
– Fix for “hanging” app caused by moving the app to the background and then resuming it on a different network (ie, pause the app on Wifi and resume on 3G)
– More reliable thumbnail generation from camera profiles which can only load snapshots
– Streamlined UI with new slider images, new toolbar images (instead of button text) and a new look for the PTZ preset list
– Eliminated the customized battery status indicator on the video screen and replaced it with the official iPhone status bar (which shows your true network connection and the realtime battery indicator). This can be toggled offscreen just like the titlebar and lower toolbar
– Memory leaks resolved relating to PTZ button presses
– Select Trendnet devices can now be rebooted from the advanced controls menu
– DLink DCS 2121 and DCS 5635 PTZ and preset support added
– Planet ICA-H610 profile with PTZ controls added
Update available, Android port underway!
After being under “review” for 7 days, Apple has finally released the 4.6 and 1.6 versions of Live Cams and Live Cams HD. The major change in these releases are the fixes for crashes caused by sliders and Canon camera profiles. If you continue to experience crashing when using the app, please contact support@barryegerter.com as soon as possible so that we can examine the issue. The application appears to be very stable on our test devices so we hope that it behaves as well for our customers 🙂
On another note, there have been a lot of requests for an Android version of Live Cams in the past few months. I’m happy to report that Google has now opened up the marketplace to Canadian developers and we are going to start porting the app to the Android platform. From first glance we will likely target the 2.1 OS as our lowest supported device. Development will be underway in a week or two and we are hoping to have a release near the end of the year. We may scale back a few features in order to get the first version out but we will definitely continue to enhance it once completed!
Live Cams 4.6 and Live Cams HD 1.6 submitted to Apple
We have released another minor update to Apple while we undergo some major engine updates (to be labelled as a 5.0 release and 2.0 HD release). Here are the details…..
New overall features:
– Corrected pinch-zoom issues with JPEG camera profile (the video frame was shifting after a new frame arrived)
– Fixed crashes related to the use of Canon cameras and PTZ slider controls
New camera profiles:
– Hawking HNC290G
– Sanyo VDC-DP9584N with PTZ and presets
New camera-specific features:
– Corrected zoom in/out increments for Axis 241S and 240Q servers using RS-485 port for PTZ control
– Fixed PTZ and presets for Trendnet IP400 and IP600 models, as well as their Airlink equivalents
– Corrected the aspect ratio display issues for the Dedicated Micros camera profile
– Added auto pan/tilt features for DLink camera profiles that were previously missing this
– Added PTZ and preset support for Compro IP530 and IP540
Pinch Zoom!
As many of you have noticed, the latest versions of Live Cams and Live Cams HD support pinch zoom on the video screen. This allows you to digitally zoom (stretch the pixels) any camera in the app.
To use this feature, simply use two fingers and pinch or expand while touching the camera video. The image will stretch to a maximum of 4 times magnification and will shrink back to original size. Once magnified you may also use a single finger to pan around the image and see parts of the picture that are now offscreen.
The pinch zoom effect does not currently work while you are using the “Control” feature to perform PTZ functionality. We hope to add this in future versions of the software.
If you take snapshots you will still get the full image saved to your photo album even if you are zoomed into a particular area of the video frame. This will allow you to save the full resolution image to another computer and you can again zoom and crop the original as you desire.
Major enhancements under development – Audio, MPEG4, and more!
That’s right, we are currently researching how to decode audio from MPEG4/H264 streams and hope to include support for this in a future release of Live Cams!
For now we will not be responding to any questions about these features because the development is still in early stages and we are not sure what the limitations or capabilities are. Our intention is to allow existing camera profiles to take advantage of MPEG4 audio/video streams if the device supports this and if the output is compatible with the decoder that we are implementing. MPEG4 has many variants and we will try to include as many as possible.
Audio streams are not part of the MJPEG (Motion JPEG) file format which is why there hasn’t been any audio support to date. MPEG4 is a container for many types of data including audio and video. Once working we should be able to playback audio from MPEG4 streams and video from JPG/MJPEG/MPEG4 streams.
There haven’t been many blog posts for quite a while due to recent incorporation of our business. We are now officially known as Eggman Technologies Inc.
Live Cams and Live Cams HD continue to enjoy top ranks in dozens of countries around the world. Live Cams has been in the top 20 utilities for the US, UK and Japan for nearly two years now and as always, we are very grateful for our customers and your support!
Performance of iOS4
We have been doing extensive testing on various firmware and device combinations over the past week and have found that the latest firmware (iOS4) has some serious performance issues that were not present in iPhone OS 3.x
For those using iOS4, one of the most important things you can do to improve the performance of Live Cams is to double-tap the home key of your device, then press and hold one of the icons that appear in the lower tray. This will show all of the icons for the background tasks with little red minus signs next to them. Remove each of the icons until all that you have left is Live Cams.
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| Remove background tasks on iOS4 to improve performance |
Most background tasks don’t actually do anything while idle but any network activity will be noticeable in an intensive app like Live Cams. We have also noted that several GUI elements of the app are “laggy” in iOS4. Apparently the graphic updates in the new firmware are not as fast as their previous counterparts. We would recommend staying with OS 3.x if possible.