MaskerAid iOS App(caseyliss.com) |
MaskerAid iOS App(caseyliss.com) |
Plus I can't even see how this simplifies anything, if you're posting to instagram it's surely simpler to skip the extra step and just use instagram's built in editor, even if you have to place the emojis yourself?
Or you could just not post those photos. What's even the point of posting a photo of your child, with the face hidden? Seems very niche. Just post another photo.
Casey Liss is a very anxious person, there is nothing wrong with that but if you make apps for people like yourself, it's an advantage to be more mainstream!
I don't use social media, but I have a group chat with a handful of close friends. Sometimes, I like to insert emojis into a photo for comedic effect.
Now I can do this without fighting with iOS's horrible Markup editor.
(Quite frankly, I'm surprised that this isn't part of iOS already.)
If you’re sharing to WhatsApp… just use their editor, it allows adding stickers and emojis natively, it doesn’t auto detect faces… but is that strictly necessary?
For double points, if you don’t wanna share on WhatsApp you can still use their editor and just send it to yourself. Now you are still only using one app, and the new photo is saved automatically to your camera roll.
Just tested it out and I was easily able to put an emoji over a face and resize/rotate it with pinch/drag type motions. Anything like that in the default Apple app?
Granted, there is nothing like the automation features in OP's app, so at least that part is interesting.
Might be a cultural US thing, but this is something my wife does a lot and I see a lot of people doing. It's one of those things that might not make sense if you don't have kids.
So blurring them out somehow protects privacy and lets parents their habitual social media posting.
That is not so say what the developer here did was wrong, I commend him for having the integrity to not reach for a "99cents/month" subscription, but that is unfortunately where all the money is unless you have a high volume app.
As he explained on his podcast, this project was designed to solve his own problem. The problem with apps designed to solve your own problem is that very often, your problem is not 1) shared by others willing to pay or 2) you don't solve the problem in the same way others want to solve a problem.
I don't, so I can't see the point of posting them because I don't imagine that anyone would look at them. But I could well be wrong.
Description: https://devpost.com/software/patronus-k61iv4
Code: https://github.com/parasmehta/patronus
Unlike this app, we also used age and emotion detection on top of face recognition.
Also reviews can be paid for…
This would make it possible to legally live stream in countries with strict privacy laws like Switzerland or Germany.
People are already doing this with other apps as you see in dating apps and stuff.
> [...]
> * The faces of protestors who are standing up against a grotesque war
I don't know if I find this disgustingly opportunistic or a solid gesture of protest and support.
Maybe both
For example a parking lot at a cancer hospital. The owner of a car can be identified by plate and therefore you need to make sure you don't expose them possibly having cancer etc.
If he had wanted to make serious money as an app developer, he wouldn’t have quit his day job.
That said, yeah it's likely there will be competitors springing up left and right if it becomes popular (recent example is this "unpacking" game, the app store was flooded with clones within a month). For apps like this, your best hope is probably that a bigger party like Instagram knocks on your door and offers to buy you out to integrate the feature into their own apps. It's cynical, but this is where we find ourselves; I don't believe single feature apps have much of a future.
A photo manipulation app (generally speaking) is great, but unless you add a social network to it like Instagram did it's not going to go far.
But that'd be the best option yes.
>Governments and tech companies such as Facebook are now continuously scanning all photos uploaded to the internet for faces, locations, and objects, effectively removing anonymity for anybody that is in any picture. A user might want to share a picture from a protest, but other users in the background might not want it known they were there.
>I would like to make a privacy focused camera application. The application will allow the user to take a picture and then it will find the faces in the picture. The user then will have to tap on the individuals in the photo they would like to be included in the final picture. By default all the faces in the picture will be marked as discard. After the user has finished selecting the faces the final picture will be produced. The faces not selected will have an effect applied to them to obscure that person identity. The user will then have the ability to share the photo to other applications, such as Twitter.
There is a lot of code in the standard library that includes face detection, didn't even have to add any libraries and was able to do the project in the last 2 weeks of class. I ended up putting a heavy mosaic over the faces, but emojis would have been just as easy. Still preferred Android dev over iOS after it, but was impressed with the included camera features.
To me the use case seems weird that she is trying to hide her kids so she can constantly post them on Instagram, when she has full control over taking pictures of her kids and what she puts on her page.
It'd be nice if this was usually built into whatever social media app people use but I wouldn't trust most social media companies to not store the original image.
A sea of mini Nickolas Cage faces in pictures of your child at a playground would entertain some people.
We need pics of thousands in the streets with Sergei Lavrov's face. Or better yet, the warmonger in chief himself.
(In this case, there is true virtue - but profoundly unlikely to be safely applied in the use case that exists)
And “time isn’t money”. It wasn’t like the time he spent developing it would have been spent working on something else.
And time is definitely money, or rather, money is time. If you already have an income stream that is more than enough for your chosen lifestyle, spending lots of time on something that might give you a tiny bit extra seems like a bad choice. Why not spend time with his family, travel, take up a hobby, or at least write an app that is just for fun. Or one that has some sort of chance of making it really really big. Obviously up to him, but still, hard to understand.
If you insert a photo into Messages and hit Markup, the first view gives you a bunch of pen/pencil/brush options, with fixed sizes per brush. There's a plus button that allows you to insert shapes and text…but you can't pinch-zoom to scale the text. You then have to tap around again to set the font size and color.
It's a weird, neglected-feeling interface. They could borrow a lot from Instagram's story editor.
That said, fully agreed the UI is very clunky compared to doing similar things in Instagram's editor.
…but this is actually not easy to do via the iOS markup editor. It defaults to a pencil tool that draws way too fine of a line to mask a face without a loooot of scribbling, and adding a shape is a lot of taps. And text, forget about it, that's a pain in the default iOS editor. (Instagram: way better at this.)
This is a weird niche of a tool—it's for people who are posting photos to the Instagram timeline where you can't use the built-in stickers feature, or sending a lot of photos via Messages. But for this tiny niche: sure, useful.
It's as if people use these things in wildly divergent ways, I guess.
The iOS markup editor isn’t nearly as friendly for slapping on emojis and resizing them with two fingers.
That said there seem to be various photo editing apps that do make it easier that OP app is competing with.
(My own App Store searching turned up one called Face Blur which seemed to have emoji as an option... as a subscription, which seems like a non-starter.)
You may as well say, "the hardest thing is to get a consumer to sign up for yet another service". And it is hard. But that is precisely how a new consumer app would get traction. It's not like Buzzfeed where no login is required, and the only thing that matters is ad impressions.
Even marketing managers can look at their phones and realize, "Why do I have all of these apps? I don't even know what half of these things are for anymore?"
I recently moved, and my new building has separate apps for: Package notifications, dry cleaning pick up/drop off, paying rent, the speakers in the ceilings, building bulletin board, reserving a common space, reserving the freight elevators, maintenance requests, pet care service, doorman notifications, self-parking, valet parking, and probably a bunch more that I've forgotten because I'd rather let my wife deal with that stuff than overwhelm myself with apps.
And that's just the building. Nevermind grocery delivery, each individual utility, food delivery, restaurants, and on and on and on.
My wife is a big app person. Hates using mobile web sites. She has at least 200 apps on her phone, all obsessively organized in tiny folders. But even she has started using the web versions of things, just because having so many apps has finally become harder than clicking a bookmark in Safari.
Apps definitely have a place for some use cases, but for most they just have so many downsides, especially invasive privacy violations. I think of running an app as similar to running some unknown/close source binary as root on my machine. Why give an app access to a whole bunch of APIs that can be used to mine me for data when it isn't needed?
Cross platform usability is also a big thing. Any apps that require typing are much better done on a laptop or desktop with a keyboard. Why should I be forced to use my tiny phone screen and super awkward mobile keyboard to fill out a form when I have a perfectly good laptop right next to me? Why should I have to run a specific operating system (apple or android) in order to be able to fill out the form?
Few people I know still get excited about apps. The curiosity and fascination is largely over. Unless there's a compelling reason, people don't want to install "another app"
This sort of nitpicky comment is exactly why people stress about putting stuff on the Internet.
Having published and maintained an app that is in active use by even a couple hundred users gives you an advantage in employability and quite a big one at that.
Your post makes it seem like you have neither published an app yourself nor hired single devs who have, and it's easy to not appreciate.
He’s on a 3 person podcast that could very well gross over $850K a year - 3 ad reads * 5500 * 52 weeks a year [1]. I wouldn’t make doing an app a high priority either.
He’s also on other podcasts.
Heck Marco, his cohost, has been very successful first with Instapaper and then with Overcast. He will be the first to admit that his UI skills aren’t that great.
It’s not like Tumblr - he was the initial developer - was ever a thing of beauty.
So: make it possible to use the service without any hurdles, but _try_ to get them to agree to as much as possible.
Many apps with worse UX and UI have been roaring successes, that is not the issue. I’m just saying that I think it’s very unlikely he will make any money from it, for reasons I’ve outlined before.
If malice was my motive, then I would egg him on, encourage him to spend lots of time doing something that doesn’t appear to be a strength.
I have seen some people use these on dating apps where they don't want their own children's or other people's children's faces to be visible. I understand that use case a bit more from a privacy perspective.
For others, its about sharing with people that you know that you and your kids had a good time while providing some privacy protection for your kids. Micro-managing who can see what picture is hard, the people that know your kids get the full mental image from the picture.
Maybe it's just me but this kinda thing seems a little weird. If it's too much work to partition into groups then maybe not post at all? But then again I'm not doing any social networks so I guess I'm not the intended audience.
But:
1. UI is not UX 2. Marco doesn’t have a UX department
Not sure what your point is about Marco to be honest.
> the rest of the time was due to him doing pass after pass improving the UX
He talked about his other app too.
Siracusa even talks about his little Mac App Store apps that he admits may have made $30.
Marco is the only one who considers his app development as a real income stream.
From my experience significantly less than 5% of iOS/Android devs have created a somewhat popular app, and maintained it for some time.
Not talking down, just telling it like it is. There is no rule on HN that you may only post laudatory comments. That would make the whole site useless. My point is that if he wants to be employable, he either needs to become more efficient, or at least hide how slow he is.
I'm sure he's raking in cash from the podcast so he shouldn't really worry about it at all in my opinion.
Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast, yet we don't know how good a programmer he is. He's made great money, and has strong opinions, but again, we don't know how good a programmer he is.
Casey used to have a "jobby-job" before leaving the corporate world. So he too might be a good, bad or excellent programmer. We don't know.
It's kind of like how you don't really know someone until you live with them. For programming, it's until you've worked with them and seen their code. All three of the hosts might be world class; or they might be average. But there's no way to determine who is the strongest programmer of the three.
We can debate who's been more successful selling their code, but we don't know where Siracusa works and code/app sales are a poor metric for code quality.
My impression is that Casey is quite weak (as in average), but meticulous.
Siracusa is almost certainly the one with the best understanding of theory, but hard to say how he is practically. He could be very good at what he's doing.
Marco also doesn't seem very strong in raw programming (he resisted Swift for half a decade, complains that it's hard to deal with, says that architecture is only for beginners etc) but obviously he can solve whatever problem he is faced with, even quite complex ones. And this is obviously what matters if you are an indie developer. That and product sense, which he is also very good at. He probably has the perfect skillset for an indie developer, better programming wouldn't make him any more successful.
You know he is good because…
> Marco is very successful with Tumblr, Instapaper, and Overcast,
I don’t need to “see his code” to know whether he is good. He is able to produce software that people pay money to acquire without the sliminess. Software is a means to an end. Not an end onto itself.
Marco is an excellent indie developer because he selects markets he has a good understanding of, finds his niche, then simply outclasses his competition by being ahead on features. He also has a loyal following from his podcasts, and is an aspirational figure for a lot of devs hoping to make money (or break free of corp serfdom).
A well written program/app isn't a necessary requirement for success.
Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.
> so that people don't know you're a foster kid unless you say so.
If you post a photo of your family and none of the children have emoji faces, why would anyone conclude that the foster child is a foster child? Because he looks different? Seems to me that emoji:ing out one child would do the opposite, draw attention to him.
EDIT: It seems we are talking about temporary arrangements, then things become clearer. Still very weird photos.
I've been in doctor's appointments where the nurse is quizzing me on my family medical history and I've had to stop them with, "We're not biologically related and I don't know the biological history". No need for them to know the whole story.
I feel privacy for kids is really important, for a number of different reasons. (preventing kids from being exploited for likes by foster parents, preservation and ownership for them to tell their story in their way when they are ready for it, privacy, sometimes protection from relatives that don't have their best interests at heart, and probably a dozen other reasons I have never thought of.) The best default is really to keep everything private in my opinion, but obviously not every agency or foster parent will agree to all the same specifics as me.
> Please refrain from posting any photos or information on social media websites about the child/ren in your care. Their presence in your home should be treated as confidential information is not to be referred to on any social media websites.
https://portal.ct.gov/DCF/CTFosterAdopt/Manual/Chapter2#Scho...
The reason you are not talking about me is that I'm not famous. Does that disqualify me from having an opinion? Do all opinions have to be positive? Do I have to (pretend to) believe that this app can make money? That seems pretty strange, this is not a kindergarten, grownups should be able to handle feedback even when it's not praise. If he needs empathy, he should go to his friends and family. I will just write what I believe, and that is that this is not a monetizable service, he is wasting his time.
He obviously has made a name for himself in podcasting, so he should double down on that. He is clearly not a product person, and I don't think he's a very good developer, he will do much better focusing on his strengths.
I'm curious, why do I need to have a podcast if I have been an iOS developer for 10 years, what's the connection?
He has gone in deep on performant low-level audio code, and how it integrates with the system APIs. He’s done a lot of interesting stuff with programmatic drawing of icons in his apps. He did a lot of good caching work back in the Instapaper days, when cell connections were almost like dialup.
He seemed to be reluctant to learn Swift, because Swift would have gotten him…what? I think he thought that Objective-C was mature, tested, comprehensible, and battle-tested in production. And it wasn’t going to change out from underneath him…which you sure couldn’t say about Swift for the first few years. You eventually had to adopt it, as Apple is moving to Swift-only, but I think Objective-C let him accomplish his goals, and a lot of the good security stuff in Swift is maybe not super relevant to his app development.
(Ugh, PHP, though…)
His use of Obj-C and PHP are just as pragmatic to me. He's an expert at Obj-C and possibly at PHP, and why change? Let Swift mature, see if Obj-C becomes deprecated, and then move on. He can obviously learn new languages since he's dabbled in Rust etc.
I do wish ATP focused more on tech stuff and less on how to live your best life on Fire Island. But I enjoy it every week.
I wouldn’t be in a hurry to get it done either.
Your comments have been terribly absolutist about your own opinions. Please accept that other people have different priorities than you. Accept that other people have different comfort levels regarding their children's privacy than you. There's nothing wrong with your priorities, but there's also nothing wrong with people whose priorities are different.
Im also not saying anything against his priorities, I don't care how he spends his time.
What I am saying is I don't think this app will make money, so if that is his main motivation, then it's a waste of time.
I keep an active open source profile just so I can pivot back to pure software development if needed. Casey likely makes more as a podcast host than he would make in corp dev as a mobile developer. Before that he was a .Net developer.
An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good.
Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.
What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing.
It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills.
As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.
Many of them could never handle the complexity of writing an entire app and maintaining the backend running on 20+ Linode VMs without the support of a trillion dollar corporation.
You really overestimate the skill and complexity of most code written by “FAANG” engineers.
FWIW, I’ve been coding for a long time (the 74 is a hint) and I started at 12 writing assembly language and spent a decade writing C including maintaining a proprietary compiler/VM for Windows CE devices.
But why is it a problem if someone sees a family photo and notices that one kid looks different? He could just be adopted, or a friend or something. Is it something like witness protection, the children might have abusive parents that shouldn't be able to find them?
If it's a matter of not standing out, they will stand out just as much when you meet them anyway, right?
Foster kids might have abusive parents as you surmised. They might have been removed from an unsafe home, or have relatives that were denied custody and might act on a photo.
Again, that is not the discussion. Nobody said that you have to write high quality code to make it in tech, or as an indie. You keep coming up with strawmen but all I am saying is that I don't believe Marco Arment writes very high quality code. That's it. No judgement, no conclusions or correlations, no nothing.
As to FAANG, I can only be certain about my own experience, and the dozen or so direct colleagues I had all wrote better code than every other colleague I've had over 10 years. Not saying they are better people, happier, richer or anything else. Just to be clear.
There are some segments from a few episodes that show that Marco is demonstrably not a super great programmer. I suspect some of his server side code is horrible. But he doesn't matter because he is super strong at other stuff super focussed on solving his own problems at gets it done. You don't need to be super great at programming you just need to be tenacious.
Yes I know all about clean code, automated testing, and “sound engineering practices”. But I’ve met a number of theoretical good coders who couldn’t ship a product that met the customer’s needs to save their lives. If I’m working to support my addiction to food and shelter, if I write code that doesn’t further that effort, I’m not being a “good programmer”.
It's like if we were discussing the IQ of tech founders and you kept interrupting, saying "IQ is not all that matters", "You can't pay your bills with IQ points", "Steve Jobs might not have a genius IQ but he was a great entrepreneur and that is more important". It's all true, but irrelevant, since it's specifically IQ levels we are discussing.
Well-written apps can meet a need, but it's like furniture. You can buy some cheap futon that gives you something to sleep on, but doesn't last long. Or you can buy a bespoke bed with handcrafted mortise and tenon joints, perfectly straight grained wood, and French polish finish. Both will give you a place to sleep, but one might last longer.
It's like my code. I have some super ugly python utils I've written that a "real" programmer would cringe when looking at the code. But it works 100% of the time when run (assuming the processes they call don't change their specs). The code is written for Python2, and breaks on Python3. It's not very clear how things work, despite extensive commenting. By your definition, these utilities would be "well written." To me, they're brittle, fragile eggs that I eventually will have to rewrite when Enterprise Security decides we can't have python2 binaries on our servers.
Marco has already solved that problem. He said if he dies, his app dies with him…
But writing the best “Enterprise FizzBuzz” that doesn’t solve a problem no matter how good the code is is meaningless. A great developer that writes code that no one uses is not a great developer.
In other words a great developer that can’t ship is worthless - the whole “smart and gets things done” metric.
FWIW, there are plenty of people who shipping great quality code everyday at Apple, Google etc. Not "FizzBuzz", but concise, human readable, robust, maintainable code. My only contention is that Marco probably wouldn't be able to write code to the standard required at some FAANGs. Casey definitely wouldn't. John quite likely. What do you think?
Keep in mind we are only discussing the code aspect. Not putting up with standups, corporate jargon, middle managers, 9-5 etc.