Category Archives: Firefox OS

Apple, Firefox OS, iOS, Mozilla, Programming, Reenact

Reenact is dead. Long live Reenact.

Last November, I wrote an iPhone app called Reenact that helps you reenact photos. It worked great on iOS 9, but when iOS 10 came out in July, Reenact would crash as soon as you tried to select a photo.

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It turns out that in iOS 10, if you don’t describe exactly why your app needs access to the user’s photos, Apple will (intentionally) crash your app. For a casual developer who doesn’t follow every iOS changelog, this was shocking — Apple essentially broke every app that accesses photos (or 15 other restricted resources) if they weren’t updated specifically for iOS 10 with this previously optional feature… and they didn’t notify the developers! They have the contact information for the developer of every app, and they know what permissions every app has requested. When you make a breaking change that large, the onus is on you to proactively send some emails.

I added the required description, and when I tried to build the app, I ran into another surprise. The programming language I used when writing Reenact was version 2 of Apple’s Swift, which had just been released two months prior. Now, one year later, Swift 2 is apparently a “legacy language version,” and Reenact wouldn’t even build without adding a setting that says, “Yes, I understand that I’m using an ancient 1-year-old programming language, and I’m ok with that.”

After I got it to build, I spent another three evenings working through all of the new warnings and errors that the untouched and previously functional codebase had somehow started generating, but in the end, I didn’t do the right combination of head-patting and tummy-rubbing, so I gave up. I’m not going to pay $99/year for an Apple Developer Program membership just to spend days debugging issues in an app I’m giving away, all because Apple isn’t passionate about backwards-compatibility. So today, one year from the day I uploaded version 1.0 to the App Store (and serendipitously, on the same day that my Developer Program membership expires), I’m abandoning Reenact on iOS.

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…but I’m not abandoning Reenact. Web browsers on both desktop and mobile provide all of the functionality needed to run Reenact as a Web app — no app store needed — so I spent a few evenings polishing the code from the original Firefox OS version of Reenact, adding all of the features I put in the iOS and Android versions. If your browser supports camera sharing, you can now use Reenact just by visiting app.reenact.me.

It runs great in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Amazon’s Silk browser. iOS users are still out of luck, because Safari supports precisely 0% of the necessary features. (Because if web pages can do everything apps can do, who will write apps?)

One of these things just doesn't belong.

One of these things just doesn’t belong.

In summary: Reenact for iOS is dead. Reenact for the Web is alive. Both are open-source. Don’t trust anyone over 30. Leave a comment below.

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Android, Firefox OS, iOS, Mozilla, Reenact, Swift

Reenact for iOS

Reenact, the world’s most popular app for reenacting photos,* is now available for iOS. It is free and ad-free.

Reenact for iOS: Reenact photos with Reenact.

Reenact for iOS was written in Swift in about three days. It’s compatible with any iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad running iOS 8 or newer. It’s open-source, just like the Android version.

Take a few minutes during the holidays this month while you’re visiting your family, and reenact a photo from your childhood. Wouldn’t your mom and/or dad and/or sister and/or brother just love that? It won’t cost you anything, and you might even have fun!

You can find Reenact on the App Store. Try it out and let me know what you think!

* Probably

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Android, Firefox OS, Mozilla, Reenact

Reenact Now Available for Android

I’ve increased the audience for Reenact (an app for reenacting photos) by 100,000% by porting it from Firefox OS to Android.

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It took me about ten evenings to go from “I don’t even know what language Android apps are written in” to submitting the .apk to the Google PlayTM store. I’d like to thank Stack Overflow, the Android developer docs, and Android Studio’s autocomplete.

Reenact for Android, like Reenact for Firefox OS, is open-source; the complete source for both apps is available on GitHub. Also like the Firefox OS app, Reenact for Android is free and ad-free. Just think: if even just 10% of all 1 billion Android users install Reenact, I’d have $0!

In addition to making Reenact available on Android, I’ve launched Reenact.me, a home for the app. If you try out Reenact, send your photo to gallery@reenact.me to get it included in the photo gallery on Reenact.me.

You can install Reenact on Google Play or directly from Reenact.me. Try it out and let me know how it works on your device!

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Firefox OS, Mozilla, Reenact

A visual refresh for Reenact

After I released Reenact (an app for reenacting photos) last week, Joen Asmussen graciously offered to provide some professional design guidance. I could never say no to design help, and in almost no time at all, Joen put together a new look for Reenact. I love it, and it has given me extra motivation to get working on Reenact for Android.

This new look is now live on the Firefox Marketplace and will hopefully be making an appearance on other platforms soon. Thanks, Joen!

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intro

capture

confirm

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Firefox OS, JavaScript, Mozilla, Open Source, Programming, Software, Web Applications

Introducing Reenact: an app for reenacting photos

Here’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: a camera app for your phone that helps you reenact old photos, like those seen in Ze Frank’s “Young Me Now Me” project. For example, this picture that my wife took with her brother, sister, and childhood friend:

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Reenacting photographs from your youth, taking pregnancy belly progression pictures, saving a daily selfie to show off your beard growth: all of these are situations where you want to match angles and positions with an old photo. A specialized camera app could be of considerable assistance, so I’ve developed one for Firefox OS. It’s called Reenact.

The app’s opening screen is simply a launchpad for choosing your original photo.

intro

The photo picker in this case is handled by any apps that have registered themselves as able to provide a photo, so these screens come from whichever app the user chooses to use for browsing their photos.

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The camera screen of the app begins by showing the original photo at full opacity.

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The photo then will continually fade out and back in, allowing you to match up your current pose to the old photo.

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Take your shot and then compare the two photos before saving. The thumbs-up icon saves the shot, or you can go back and try again.

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Reenact can either save your new photo as its own file or create a side-by-side composite of the original and new photos.

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And finally, you get a choice to either share this photo or reenact another shot.

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Voila!

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If you’re running Firefox OS 2.5 or later, you can install Reenact from the Firefox OS Marketplace, and the source is available on GitHub. I used Firefox OS as a proving ground for the concept, but now that I’ve seen that the idea works, I’ll be investigating writing Android and iOS versions as well.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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