Create a mobile compatible, image editing tool. Kind of analogous to Photoshop or The GIMP – but for a small screen.
Constraints
Network
Given the limitations (currently) of writing a native iPhone application, the application would be slower/less capable than if it could run natively on the hardware.
The largest problem would be the speed and reliability of the mobile network. Given the 1G iPhone’s lack of high-speed data transfer (EDGE doesn’t really cut it) the app may well be painfully slow to use. This would really affect the usability of the application and limit it to nothing more than emergency editing (i.e. you can’t use anything else). I think this would be a problem over any sort of mobile wireless access (Wifi is fine, but it’s still a LAN) since those networks have both relatively low bandwidth and rather high latency. Wether the application would still be responsive enough to be “usable” would be quite a challenge.
But for the moment, I’ll assume a 3G or 3.5G iPhone will come out for our ‘lil Southern Land – even so, the issue of 3.xG network coverage will be important.
Currently on my 3G Nokia, I find 3G deadspots in many places around Sydney, including:
- The rail network
- The City Circle – no mobile coverage at all
- The Airport Line – GSM voice/SMS only. No 3G coverage
- East Hills Line – patchy voice reception. Presumably data reception is also limited.
- The CBD – there are alot of mobile blackspots in the inner city. Given that this is a likely area of use for any mobile technology it’s definately a pain.
Probably the best way to combat this would be an offline application (again, forcing it to run natively) which can upload content via the network when it becomes available – ideally, it can do this in the background.
Interface
The interface really makes or breaks any mobile app. Most cellphones have really crappy interfaces hiding really useful options below a set of nested menus.
Trying to create a compelling and easily usable interface is certanly a challenge on a mobile platform. To compound things, creating this application to run on any capible phone would drastically increase the potential market. But, the downside is that you then have loads of possible input devices and screen-resolutions etc…
On the upside!
There are a bunch of reasons why this at least would be theoretically possible. Technologies like:
- Publicly accessible APIs for web sites like Flickr mean a third-party application can post images to a users account.
- Server-side applications like Adobe Flex or the opensource GD/ImageMagick allow photos to be edited on a server environment.
Steps
Ignoring all of the problems I’ve thought of… here is a rough list of what a person would do to use the application.
- User takes photo
- User loads application
- User uploads their photo(s)
- Can be automatically set to default and uploaded to their website/blog
OR- The user can crop and rotate the image
- The user can choose to auto adjust colour and brightness (autofix) or manually adjust the image.
- The image can be rescaled to new dimensions ready to be posted.