This weekend I was browsing Casey Neistat's vlogs and it got me thinking about his latest app Beme. Beme is a social network based around the idea of everything that is put online is personally curated, edited out of context, and not a true representation of the user. His app doesn't allow the reviewing of content before the video is posted. Think snapchat stories without being able to cancel or doodle on what you’ve just recorded.
The implementation was especially interesting to me. The trick of the app is that they use the proximity sensor on the front of the phone to identify when the screen is covered and when to enable the camera. They currently only have an iOS app, so I wondered if it was possible on Android...
Introducing: Proximity Camera
This proof of concept app came out of an evening hackathon supported by Triumph Brewery's Zitronenweizen. I think I pulled off the concept quite well, and while it is a bit rough and ready, it was a good excuse to play with the Camera APIs and design support library. Many thanks to Casey for the prompt, StackOverflow for debugging, and Roman Nurik’s assets generators for the lazy graphics.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to try and release more apps just to expand my knowledge and test myself, hopefully I’ll manage to get another one out by the end of the year.