I blame a few lines of code that developers might cling to- [view.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];
Basically, dumping any view straight to memory and then from there you can save it easily to the photo library. The trick is to have offscreen coregraphics buffers, which isn’t too difficult, but it can be scary rotating and translating some big chunks of memory. And therein lies the fun…

What's interesting is that it's actually an extra step in the code to down sample an image from the library to 320×480. My only guess is that it's to conserve memory in favor of not crashing (and actually what causes my app to crash when it does), but through extensive testing I've found that a first generation iPod Touch running iTunes in the background can easily (although slowly) deal with bitmapped 1600×1200 images from the library, and the iPhone 3GS can work with the 2560×1600 OS X wallpapers (and actually haven't found the ceiling on what the iPad can do). I'm absolutely astonished that apps do this. It really doesn't make sense.

HOWEVER, it's different for realtime photo taking apps. The framework for capturing the camera stream is in the private not-allowed-in-app-store category, but a framework we CAN use lets us capture the phone's display's pixels (which is 480×320). Of course, there is an obvious workaround to this, which I don't intend to give away to these developers right here.

MY guess is these apps are typically from developers who are new to the platform (both iPhone AND OS X) and have no idea how Quartz works (or image processing in general for that matter), and instead rely on terrible bandaids they learned when trying to do anything graphics related in Java or .net

I know. I really like travel….

=M=

Much respect to Marty and LifeInLofi, and Glyn of iPhoneography.com, as these are the two premier iPhoneography websites as far as I can tell, (and the only two to have a home on my homescreen) to keep the community informed about apps, contests a goings-on in the iPhoneography community. Also kudos to SCW, the bulldog in the community, who likes a good scrap with dev's who put out lo-res apps, and does so on all of our behalf, really.

Note: I'd really like to see Chase Jarvis's BestCamera app see an update. I really liked this app when it first came out for it's simple interface and the ability to upload to many different social sites at one time. However the ability to work & save at full res. is always such a challenge. I'd like to be able to work and save at full res without it CRASHING all the time! That's all, is it really too much to ask? CameraBag was really my first photo editing app and is still one of my favorites. Saves at full res and rarely if ever crashes.

-Max

1. Low Res apps are created by lazy, opportunistic bottom feeders. @Takayuki Fukatsu brought up some other potential reasons related to outdated apps.

2. Apple should add a couple of required fields for any camera app: Max resolution and whether the app takes advantage of iPhone's Photo Album (I no longer buy apps that don't support the Photo Album or save as hi-res, so no point in trying to sell them to me).

3. Apple should provide free demo capability for all apps. No legitimate developer would have a problem with providing a demo and it would probably mean better apps initially instead of having to wait a year for what should have been a version 1 app. The lack of demos completely supports abuse and in fact promotes an almost spam-like approach to business practices (i.e. drop app, take the money, run, rename, drop another app, take more money, run, rename…).

4. Bloggers should take a few minutes and look at some well designed blogs (or dare I say it, print) and take some design/usability cues. For example, a callout box with res and other feature specifics would be a trivial task (hint: [div class="callout"][/div] .callout: margin: 20px; border: 1px solid #eee; padding:10px; background-color….). This would save a lot of time for the readers of the blog. It is just as annoying having to scroll through gobs of text just to find out that the app doesn't support the Photo Album or creates postage stamps.

5. Another idea for bloggers…perhaps integrate a "tweet this" feature much like what MacHeist does that makes it supper simple for people to tweet about an app to avoid. Something like Avoid app: x as it doesn't support feature x which means you can't x.

Like I said, I didn't go through all the comments above so a lot of this is probably repetitive…in that case…+1…

Thumbs app for your TitShiftGen. I love it too

@MartyNearDFW

I hated and loved Hipstamatic at the same time. Loved for the effects it uses to make beautiful shots and hated because of 500×500 image size Nove I just love it with its 1500×1500 support

Oh, one more thing, your description says:

"loves travel, beer, coffee, baseball, Macs, photography, scotch and travel." Either you love traveling, or you had too much beer/scotch when you wrote that

This post was mentioned on Twitter by MartyNearDFW: #iphoneography New post: Rant: It’s Not a Crusade Against All 320×480 Apps http://tr.im/Swax…

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

I can see your point about a super-low-res app being a free version and the need to pay for hi-res. I don't have an issue with those and have gladly and quickly paid to upgrade to the full version if I liked the app. (Disclosure: I almost always pay for the apps that I review)

The apps that frustrate and disappoint me are the ones where 320×480 (or less) is the highest resolution that the app will ever output — paid or free — especially when the developer is charging $1-$2 for an app that produces unusable results for me.

That leaves your reasons 1 or 2….

For the benefit of the reader, your app QuadCamera saves at 800×600 pixels. It's still low res (but not super-low screen resolution). And a BIG thank you for stating this clearly in QuadCamera's description. This allows the purchaser to make an informed decision before buying your app.

Also, one of your other apps, TiltShift Generator, absolutely rocks — one of my faves!

=M=

Basically I agree with you.

However as an aspect of developer, I have something to mention.

Lower image with 320×480 app basically has Three reason.

1: Developer is stupid.

2: App using super cpu / memory extensive processing, or developer's skill issue.

3: That is free version and you need to pay for hi-res.

Also 1200×1600 app has reason.

1: Application is old, made on early 3G ages.

2: Backward compatibility for both 3G and 3Gs.

3: App using super cpu / memory extensive processing, also backward compatibility for 3G.

Another well know row-rez size is 320 x 427 has more serious problem for resolution.

The reasons for this is. My app QuadCamera use this approach and cant change the resolution.

1: App uses screen capture, therefore it is restricted with iPhone's screen size.

Problem is that apple doesn't provide easy way to detect camera size or iPhone generation.

That's why there is not so much app that supports multiple iPhone generation.

It works for even the most advanced filters in a decent manner. Your better off with the example as the tutorial is just an intro with the source files copy/pasted.

So, no more excuses now.

I don't like crappy apps for my wonder camera, but unfortunately there are way too many of them available!!
Before I buy an app, I do read the reviews. If I pick up the least negativity vibe, I just move on to something else.

Very frustrating and annoying when you find an app that has an effect that looks superb and that you love, but will only save in a small format….

Great rant.

Anyway, I think I'm going to write a tutorial and example soon about how to enable image editing apps to use full resolution support and keep resource usage to the minimum. Would be a great way for beginning developers to start or update their app to full resolution. I wasn't allowed to make any of the code public the Apple engineers shared but that code has been pushed to the background anyway in newer versions. So I'm sure Apple can't have anything against a tutorial.

Danny

_________________________

[1] It _is_ possible to email a full-res image by copying from the camera roll (tap and hold for the edit menu) and pasting into an email message. It's just not intuitive compared to the more-intuitive, but resolution-challenged email sharing method.

He is dedicated & eager to push the limits & successfully release quality apps. So as one of the good guys sharing his detailed inside information on to others it's a welcome bonus for us all.

Cheers SCW

One of the problems comes with Apple and the iPhone SDK. If you capture an image from the cameraroll you have the choice as developer to open it as an original or to "allow editing". This means that people will be faced with a dialog which allow them to resize and crop. The maximum size of the cropped image is 320×320 if I'm not mistaking. So many developers go the "easy" way and choose this. I did as well until I caught attention from the iPhoneography community and contacted Apple for ways to allow full resolution in my apps. Cause to be honest, it isn't simple to work with 1600×1200 images on a device with such little memory available.

The next problem is indeed that some filters are too complicated to be performed in a fast way on full resolution images on the iPhone, even desktop computers have problems with efficiently handling some graphics operations. So people develop a great app and put a lot of time in it and then find out that their filter is too intense for the iPhone's hardware and requires minutes to apply to a full resolution image. So to get the app out in time they simply lower the resolution. But I agree that they still have to put a note in the description about this.

Another issue is the lack of opensource apps which show people how it's really done. Apple doesn't allow App Store apps to be opensource so beginning developers can't just take a look in another app or use it as the base for their app.

I'm not justifying the developers, but I was once in the same shoes. Luckily with the help of the Apple Dev Support engineers I managed to get full resolution PNG/JPEG support in most of my apps. The only one that's still lacking full resolution support is iPhix, but that's just because I haven't had any time to update it yet. I'm eager to do so and when it's updated it will flawlessly operate full resolution images without delaying anything, but time's expensive at the moment. But I don't advertise the app and I tell people to wait for an update before buying and also clearly note in the first few lines of the description that it saves at 320×320 with a 2 line note. So if any developer has an app like this and decides to keep it online, that's an absolute necessity.

So for all developers reading this, load a small scale version of your image into your app as preview and store a reference to your old image in an NSDictionary named eg. "dict". Use "UIImage *image = [dict objectForKey:@"UIImagePickerControllerOriginalImage"];" to load the original image and perform these effects again on this image before saving. You can do this by saving which actions were performed in a global variable and reading it and performing all actions again at save. The saving process will take a little longer but you allow a full resolution preview in this way with minimal lag.

Just my two cents.