Simple Android Apps – Simple Camera

Welcome to my fourth post in this Simple android Apps series.
This particular post is special because today is my special day. It was on this day, many years ago, that mama finally pushed me out of her womb. That is to say that, today is my birthday.
I got a lot of good wishes and a lot of people posted my pictures on social media. I felt really loved and deep within me, I’m truly grateful to God and everyone that has helped me get to where I am today.

One other thing I did today was to reflect on the journey so far. I went through some old photos, compared them to the new photos and tried to imagine how much things have changed.
I could not just help laughing at the uncommon transformation that the pictures portrayed. Every year seems to add a little change to me even though I might not notice, life truly advances each day.

Looking at those photos, something struck me. I noticed I had only one photo of me when I was below a year old. The photo in question is almost spoilt anyways. However, that is not the case with my young nephew. I can comfortably show him over 20 different pictures of Him when he was a year old. The difference between my time and His time is simply the evolution of technology.
Back then my parents had to pay a photographer to take me the only infant picture that I have, the picture itself was given in paper form thereby giving my parents issues when it comes to safe keeping it. A lot of old childhood photos has been lost due to damage as a result of water contact or the photo paper defect.

That is not the case in my Nephew’s generation. I don’t need to call a photographer in other to have His picture. With the availability of my smartphone’s camera, all I do is simply take a lot of photos of Him whenever I visit. I save some to cloud storage and I’m sure he wouldn’t have to complain of lacking photos when He is grown.

There are just some moments that we cannot help but want to capture. Capturing moments in form of photo or video is one of the best methods of saving memories. Since we cannot always move around with a professional photographer, there’s, therefore, the need for everyone to have a functional camera application on their device. The phone camera can always come in handy in case the need arise for you to take a quick photo or record a quick video. It could be for fun, business or for safety.

The solution to this photo/video need is what takes me to the fourth application in this series.
This application attempts to solve the above problems by always giving you a standby camera that is always at your service.
The application in the review is known as ‘Simple camera’.

What is a simple camera?

The Simple camera may be defined as an android application that enables the user to take both photos and also record videos. It allows the user to switch camera sides (that is; to switch between rare camera and front camera in case of a selfie), zoom in/out and also turn the flash on/off.

Features of Simple Camera

The phone camera is one of the important features of a good phone. Most phone manufacturers try to lure people to their device by giving the phone a high-quality camera. Some device megapixel is almost as high as some professional camera. However, most people don’t patronize the device inbuilt camera application. They most times try to take resort in a third party application.
What drives them to this third-party application is best known to the individual involved but we can guess ‘better photo outcome’ as one of the common reasons.
Although I expected more, the Simple camera has its own basic features that I’ll be talking about below.

User interface

I’ve always been a good advocate of a simple user interface in most of my previous post. However, the user interface of this particular application is a little bit below what I expected. Even though I was able to adjust some settings to make me feel better while using the application, the whole place was still very scanty and lacked some basic buttons that would have made me better enjoy using the application.
I would suggest for the developers to enhance the application appearance by making it more catchy and engaging for the users.

Colour and theme customization

The developers did not fail in this aspect. As usual, they made it possible for the user to change the colour of their theme, text colour, background colour, primary colour and the application icon colour. This actually tried to make up for the low score the application had in terms of appearance. I tried my best to feel at home by adjusting the above colours to my taste.

Basic customizations

The application has some basic customization that can be useful to the user.
In terms of sound, there is an option for the user to turn the shutter sound either on or off. The shutter sound is always annoying to me, therefore making it possible for me to turn it off is a cool thing.
Sometimes you may have the need to secretly record or take a photo of someone without the knowledge of any other person around. Not having the power to turn off the shutter can hinder that and even put your life in danger if care is not taken.

There is an inbuilt provision in the application that enables the usage of the volume buttons while taking shots. This means that pressing the appropriate volume button will take the photo as long as the setting was enabled. This can be useful when a user wants to take a picture of himself using the rear camera which is most times always sharper than the front one.

There is also a setting that enables anyone using a dual camera Phone to always open the rear camera each time the application is launch. This feature completely eliminates the time lost in switching in between cameras especially when the user is addicted to the rear camera only.

The last but not the least feature that I’ve noticed in the application has to do with the file saving section of the application.
The simple camera application just like most application makes it possible for the user to choose where the file should be saved.
Another thing that impresses me is the application inbuilt photo compressor. This feature gives me the ability to minimize space. However, a little photo quality might be lost in this process depending on the compression percentage.

Other basic features

There are other basic features available in the application that are worth mentioning. These are;

• The ability to set your image and video resolution.
  

• The ability to turn on/off the inbuilt flash in a flash enabled device.
• The ability to switch in between rear and front camera.
• The ability to enable the ‘focus before capture’ option. This setting is however not recommended in cases of emergency because the photo will not be captured immediately you click on the capture button. This is due to the fact that the camera will try to autofocus on the object first.

Conclusion and Suggestion

Personally, I expected more features from this camera application due to the performance of the developers in their previous applications. It was however not up to my expectation and I suggest that the developers work on the appearance of the application.
It will also be nice to see them include some photo filters and beauty functions.
If this application is to compete with the big cameras out there, the developers should also add the ‘EDIT’ function.
Most third party camera users want to tweak their photos the way they want, they want to use beauty filters and beauty features to make their photos outstanding. The social media age has no room for imperfections and for that reasons, they have to look extra beautiful at all times.

Despite the camera flaws, the simple camera is still a nice android application for a basic camera user.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article is entirely my own personal view and does not reflect the mind or view of anyone else.

Links

Project repository
https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Camera

Github profile
https://github.com/dongentle2

Android download link
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplemobiletools.camera

Resources

This post and all its contents were written by me based on my Experience, Research, Knowledge and personal use of Simple Camera Android application.
Most Images are from my usage screenshots and all other ones are properly referenced.

Series backlinks

Below is the link to the first Post of this series.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@dongentle2/simple-android-apps-simple-gallery

Below is the link to the second post of the series
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@dongentle2/simple-android-apps-simple-gallery

Below is the link to the third post of the series.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@dongentle2/simple-android-apps-simple-calendar