Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Live Cams - Tablet Edition

With today's announcement of the iPad device (finally official!) I thought it would also be good to announce my intentions for the next app....

Live Cams - Tablet Edition

Once the new hardware becomes available I intend to port the existing Live Cams application to a new codebase and enhance the UI for the much larger and crisper iPad resolution. Much of the code in Live Cams is focused on scrunching data down to a smaller resolution and then painting the screen. The purpose of this is to improve the framerate and also reduce the processor usage while at the same time improving on the app's responsiveness.

It appears from the demos today that the new iPad will be much faster with respect to graphics and should be capable of showing higher resolution images without any degradation in performance. Live Cams is well suited for an iPad device because security video should ideally be high-res, especially in the often low-light conditions under which the cameras are located.

The new devices are expected to be available in two to three months so it will be a while before I can start work on the new software but I certainly intend to offer something better suited than my current product. It will not be offered as an upgrade but will have to be a new purchase for those who wish to move to this new device. I expect to offer it for $3.99 initially.

Please add your thoughts on the user forums at http://livecams-iphone.com/forums