I think it’s been changed since, but wow was it weird finding out that instead of taking photos, the Android app used to essentially take a screenshot of the camera view.
I worked on the camera in Instagram iOS for a while. There at least, there could be a 5,000ms latency delta between the “screen preview” and the actual full quality image asset from the camera DSP in the SOC.
I don’t know a thing about Android camera SDK but I can easily see how this choice was the right balance for performance and quality at the time on old hardware (I’m thinking 2013 or so).
Users didn’t want the full quality at all, they’d never zoom. Zero latency would be far more important for fueling the viral flywheel.
I worked on the Snapchat Android back in 2017. It's only weird for people who have never had to work with cameras on Android :) Google's done their best to wrangle things with CameraX, but there's basically a bajillion phones out there with different performance and quality characteristics. And Snap is (rightfully) hyper-fixated on the ability to open the app and take a picture as quickly as possible. The trade off they made was a reasonable one at the time.
Things have improved since then, but as I understand it, the technical reason behind that is that it used to be that only the camera viewfinder API was universal between devices. Every manufacturer implemented their cameras differently, and so developers had to write per-model camera handling to take high quality photos and video.
:) this is exactly how we used to do it even on iOS, back in the days before camera APIs were not made public, but Steve Jobs personally allowed such apps to be published in the iOS App Store (end of 2009) ...
That was the only way to avoid the insane shutter lag that was very common on Android phones at the time. It's called SnapChat not HoldStillForAMinuteChat so it made sense.
Blame Google if you want to blame anyone. They could have mandated maximum shutter lag times (maybe they do now, I don't know).
I made one for roughly $100 USD from an Arduino, steel rods, some stepper motors, and some 3D printed parts.
Having an existing 3d printer is a bit “draw the rest of the owl” for this, but being able to extend and modify a device like a pen plotter is pretty nice.
That language isn’t the same language I became more proficient in, so are you sure it’s not terrible, useless, and will lose handily to the one I use for my specific purposes?
Reminds me a bit of BMWs and their infamous and persistent coolant pump woes. The running joke in those circles is "replacing the entire cooling system" counts as "basic, regular maintenance". BMW makes a fantastic engine, then makes the water pump impeller out of plastic. For what feels like decades.
My E39 (which is a beacon of reliability for the brand) had a radiator neck made of a kind of plastic that becomes brittle with prolonged exposure to heat. It's a good thing there's no heat associated with the radiator. "Replace the entire radiator" was a ~70k mile maintenance task.
I have the B58 which is fantastic and does come with an all metal, mechanical water pump which I thought would be a pleasant break, but my gasket still failed. BMW and water pumps, classic.
Interesting and novel take. Do you think making that would enable you to also make a better distributed note taking system, or do you think you need the distributed note taking system first?
I'd like to see some form of regulation around % of visible screens/information presented in a public space needing to be specifically useful to the population vs pure advertising.
It's frustrating to be at a train station where every wall is an ad for something, and the actual information concerning the trains themselves is either tucked away on a much smaller, much lower quality screen in the corner, or worse, not working at all.
Basically I'd like to see some solutions to the problem that I'm generally being shown ads at the expense of the public service I'm trying to use.
The trend is basically back to where it would be if you just extrapolated 2019.
You can even see the origin of the "vibe-session" here, things got pretty good for a lot of people in the money shower of the pandemic stimulus combined with low "stay at home" spending. Its the return to normal that has people spun with "the economy sucks".
It's always fun to see a graph like this and realize that (aside from the pandemic), that the last time people were significantly better off by this metric was 30 years ago, while many of us were children, or not even born yet. And yet everyone is complaining that things are so bad, and that this is a new phenomenon.
As a result, I can open Spotify in the background and have it play music while I game, from the primary SteamOS interface.