I’ve been working on an iphone app called Twitmo which lets you take a bog-standard iPhone photo, and turns it into something a bit more interesting. You can then write a tweet by tapping on the image, and send the whole thing off to Twitter. Well, to Twitpic actually, but it’s effectively the same thing.
The philosophy behind Twitmo is the same as my earlier app, Phlomo: take quick Lomo style snaps of whatever tickles your fancy, and upload them quickly and easily to a social networking site. In this case Twitpic and Twitter.
It’s been a long, hard fight getting this app ready, mainly because of problems with image processing. Basically the iPhone has a very weird way of knowing which way up a photo should be. If you want to do real image processing this creates real headaches. I got round it in Phlomo by letting the user use the iPhone’s built-in crop, just after a photo’s taken. I don’t know how this fixed the problem, but it did. But a number of people complained that the resulting image was small and poor quality.
So, with a lot of late-night trial and error I finally got the image processing sorted.
Uploading an image to twitpic is easy. Although I’m slightly concerned that twitter are phasing in OAuth, but twitpic have made no noises about when they’re falling in line with twitter. I guess sometime later this year I may have more coding to do…