Instants / 2013

A photo browser for camera rolls that had outgrown scrolling.

My part: A personal project after I left Canonical, to take what I’d learned on Ubuntu to touch: product design, native iOS development and marketing.
What shipped: Released a month after iOS 7 added Moments and favourites, which was most of what Instants did. Featured on CNET and Cult of Mac, and second in Photo & Video in Italy for a week.

Instants 1.0.

A few specialised ways to browse, depending on what you remember about the photo.

Sketch of the five lenses — The lenses: favourites and tags first, then time, place and colour.

Sketch of colour-coded groups of photos — Groups by month or city, colour-coded: structure without folders.

Onboarding: picking favourites from the imported photos — Onboarding: pick your favourites first.

Meaningful gestures

A touch interface should be forgiving, because fingers are imprecise and there is no undo you can count on. A dialog with text to read is too distracting in an immersive, touch-driven experience, and it stops working the moment people start ignoring it. So the confirmation became a gesture that meant something in relation to the action.

Slide across a group to split it, drag a photo to the bin — Slide to split, drag to the bin: the gesture is the confirmation.

Swipe-Through

To feel an interaction before coding it, I built Swipe-Through on top of Adobe Flash: you craft the animations on a linear timeline, then drive that timeline with touch. The deletion confirmation took twenty minutes to prototype and six hours to implement natively. I went on to use it for other commercial projects, and The magic of animations, written at the time, is about that way of working.

Swipe-Through on an iPad.