Have you ever missed a great photo because it took just a little too long to get your iPhone camera app opened up and ready to snap? I know I have. Snappy is a new (jailbreak) camera app that should help to solve this problem – as it launches just about instantly from anywhere in the iPhone OS.
It launches and is ready to shoot in 1-2 seconds – just by tapping and holding the status bar from within any application or even from the lock screen.
I’ve been testing the app out a bit last night and this morning, and it works very well, just as advertised. It launches and is ready to shoot in around 1/3 the time the built-in camera app does, and lets you snap straight back to the app you were in with a simple home button press when you’re done snapping pics.
Screenshots won’t give you any feel for how lightning fast Snappy is – so check out the video demo at the top of this post to see it in action.
Snappy is available now for $1.99 in the Cydia store.
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Does it interfere with sbsettings?
Nope, not at all.
I noticed a faster drain in battery after installing this app. No other apps are running in the background and even "push" is set to off.
Do you know if this works with 3.0?
Not positive, but i imagine yes as there is nothing stated about any firmware version required for it on its Cydia page. I've asked the dev via Twitter.
The dev just confirmed that yes it does work with 3.0.
Oh nice find! Ok, this has almost made me want to go back to being jailbroken. The slow camera app is one of my major complaints and I've frequently missed shots just waiting for the app to launch. Seems to take it nice time when I'm most needing it to open NOW! LOL! I may have to check Snappy out. If only I could convince myself to stay jailbroken for longer than a few days.
Cough – 3GS – cough, cough
What kinda resources does this use? Only thing holding me back from buying it is that I figure keeping the camera ready to take pics all the time probably uses up a decent amount of memory or processing power. Have you noticed any battery drain, significant memory usage, or anything else?
So far I see no noticeable impact at all on free memory / general system performance. Too early to say anything much at all on battery life – sorry.
Why cant i find it in Cydia?
Would be nice idea if the developer opened it up so that you can tell it which app you want to run when holding the status bar, so you could use it with third party camera apps, or even another type of app altogether.
Hmmm – yeah that might be quite interesting.
I think it's ok the way it is. If you start adding features you lose the main reason why you use this app, ultraquick capture.
Hey Nice Find! Thanks for sharing with us. I'm going to pick this one up too. It seems like lately Im using my 3gs to take pictures more often than my digital canon camera. This will come in handy because I've always wished the darn camera would load faster.
Cool – glad you found the post useful.
Could I accomplish this same thing by setting camera (I actually prefer Camera Genius) as a backgrounded app using the new multiflow thingy that you also wrote about today?
That would be another nice way to switch over and have it always ready, but I think the Snappy method probably still wins out for shortest time to launch and be ready. Haven't tested though.
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