iSlide Camera shares photos instantly with any device
I sure want it. In the meantime, I created a little hack now available for free in Apple’s iTunes Store. Its called “iSlide Camera.” Ok, ok, I’m not the best at naming these things. I’m open for suggestions.
The app is curiously fun. It all began out of my frustration with trying to share photos, live, with another person while talking on my phone.
I wanted the other person to see what I was seeing. I wanted the ability to snap a photo, then have it instantly appear on another person’s phone, be it a Blackberry, a mobile web browser, or even their desktop (assuming they were calling from home).
I went home and hacked something together, first on the iPhone, then on a few servers on Amazon. By combining the cloud with mobile devices, the service finally provides the utility I sought.
It works. The effect is remarkable. I was at a conference a few months ago, trying it out. I put my iPad on a desktop, opening Safari to my short URL at http://isli.de. I just let the iPad sit there. Then, one by one, I started snapping photo’s. The pictures changed instantly on the iPad, fading in seconds after they were uploaded from my camera.
“Is that an app?”
“Well, soon. Think people will like it?”
“Its fun. I’d buy it.”
I tried all kinds of names:
- Social camera
- Photo conferencing
- Photo time
- Instant Photo
- Photomatic
- Network camera
- Instant Slideshows
- iSlide
There weren’t a lot of URLs available from GoDaddy. I liked iSlide the best, then registered a play on the name, “iSli.de”. That’s pretty short. Now, when I upload pictures, I create a slideshow and give it a shortened URL, like http://isli.de/1.
One problem I had to solve was deciding when to start and end a particular slideshow. If I’m out shopping, I’d like the slideshow to change whenever I change stores. That got me to thinking about FourSquare, geo location, and checking in. I played around with the geographic APIs from Simple Geo, Four Square, and Geo API. The final service blends all three. When you upload a picture, I check your location, and try to find a place in FourSquare. If its a new place or later in the day (after 8 hours seemed best), I create a new slideshow for you. All subsequent photos then feed into this gallery. As an added bonus, the app will check you into FourSquare if its the first time today.
The app has to do reverse geocoding. That’s the process of taking a longitude and latitude and turning it into a descriptive location. Google provides a great service. But. You have to use the information to display a Google Map. I wanted it for slideshows, so that wouldn’t work. I ended up using a combination of my own Tiger Data from the US Government (all 8 million records in a SQL database) and several live services. Simple Geo is best for finding street locations. GeoAPI is best for finding specific, geometric areas and working across all the geo startups out there. Besides, its Twitter.
Oh, want to Tweet or update Facebook? Keeping the app simple, I let Foursquare do that for me. When you check into Foursquare, and if you’ve set up your account properly, both Twitter and Facebook will get a tweet and status update.
I hope you enjoy my iSlide Camera. I plan on adding a lot more functionality, better designed galleries, and more. Thanks to the beauty of iAds, the more people that use it, the more it pays for the infrastructure on Amazon (costing me about $300/mo right now).
