Ask HN: review My 120k flex app done in one month

by ktharavaad on 12/30/2008, 2:32 AM with 6 comments

http://www.kpicturebooth.com

Here is the app, its heavily inspired by Apple's photobooth, therefore you need a webcam and Flash 10 to use it. It implements almost all of the features of photobooth, including background removal and video effects. I've also included export to both Facebook and Flickr

Here are some of my thoughts after I wrote this

http://tharavaad.wordpress.com

If it generates enough interest, I will clean up the code and opensource it.

  • by thwarted on 12/30/2008, 7:53 AM

    From your blog:

    "Users will have to download them, or use Flickr or Facebook to store these photos. This decision was made because I’m poor and don’t have the money for the massive bandwidth for server side photo hosting."

    Don't apologize for this, it's the right option.

    - Leverage the tools people already use and are used to.

    - Save the users some work. The way photos are shared today is through sites like flickr, allowing the output to uploaded directly saves the user the step of doing it themselves.

    - Uploading to popular services serves to increase awareness of your app. Including a plea to get people to "spread the word about where they generated the image" can help this too.

    - Not making it easy to send the output directly to popular services potentially creates a walled-garden effect, and may make your tool more a single-shot gee-wiz-isn't-this-neat visit, rather than something that encourages people to come back because it's so easy to do what they would have anyway.

    - By allowing people to save the images to their local drive and send to other services, you communicate that you are not trying to lock them in. This is one of the worst sins, if not the worst, you can commit in this post-web-2.0 world of integrated and aggregated services and user generated content. I hate sites that try to drive traffic back to themselves for no obvious user benefit (evite, and "greeting card" sites come to mind).

  • by deathbob on 12/30/2008, 3:04 PM

    It works for me, pretty cool. Suggest you find some way to let one person be the photographer and the other the subject. Let the person with the webcam just sit there and the other person click when to take the picture and add effects. Maybe add basic paint functionality so they can add horns / moustache. Then share. Have to make it web 2.0 after all ;-)

  • by tharavaad on 12/30/2008, 8:33 AM

    Thanks for the feedback. You are right about many of these things. From the technical side, I also think that the decision to make it a completely self-contained application will make it easier when I decide to package it up into an AIR application.

  • by tharavaad on 12/30/2008, 5:30 AM

    Right click -> Settings -> in the camera tab -> select the correct camera from the dropdown, on my macbook pro, its the "USB Video Class Video".

  • by siong1987 on 12/30/2008, 5:09 AM

    It doesn't work with my camera. I am using macbook pro.

  • by yan on 12/30/2008, 4:36 AM

    I'd be very interested to see the source