BitCam

Past Explosion!

BitCam was a digital camera you could use on a micro pocket computer as early as 1996. We're celebrating it as part of celebrating the 20th anniversary of Iconfactory.

The design brief for this app was simple: "Given the limitations of the past, what would we design today?"

What we ended up with shows how far technology has advanced since we first wrote software for Apple products.

Back then, it was a black-and-white interface because color graphics support was hit or miss. Some had it, some didn't. The micro palm computers definitely needed an upgraded color graphics card, and the hardware cost hundreds of dollars!

In today's era, we don't see any typical animations either. The app. Zoom rectangles are used for view transitions, the credit roll is jerky, and thick controls are standard for the course. (Man, would they have had a hard time implementing on today's devices that do asynchronous layout and high-resolution drawing without XOR operations!)

One thing we did notice that has changed over the years is the importance of keeping things clear and simple in the user interface. BitCam's graphics are clearer but have many of the same characteristics we strive for in our current client work. (We also wish the buttons had borders.)

Retina displays, selfies, and social networks didn't exist in 1996. Coming up with the terms in BitCam was a blast: we did our best to guess future mistakes! The only rea...