San Francisco, California – Developers Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With are proud to announce the release and immediate availability of Halide 1.6: The Speed Update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. This Halide update focuses on speed. We now snap photos 2-4x faster, added shortcuts, and taken the guesswork out of files and formats to make you more efficient. For iPhone X users, we’ve also made some minor ergonomics improvements, now that we’ve had the device in our hands for a month.

Lock Screen and 3D Shortcuts

By popular demand, we’ve added a lock screen widget to launch Halide with one tap. We’ve also added 3D shortcuts to launch the app in either Manual or Auto mode. Even snappier snapping!

Faster Capture

Halide now captures your shot between two to four times faster. You read that right: up to four times faster. Everything feels a lot more responsive, as we’ve cut down the time between hitting the capture button and the new photo appearing. Now users immediately know when they’ve captured the perfect shot.

RAW Without Compromise

When a user opens a RAW image in an app that can’t read RAW, the image looks blurry. We can’t fix those apps, but we’re improving the situation. Apps that aren’t compatible will now fall-back to a processed image we intelligently save alongside the user’s RAW shot.

A few editing apps won’t find the RAW photo when saving a RAW Processed image. If an editor has this bug, users can turn off the RAW Processed option within ‘Advanced Settings.’ We urge users to contact the developer, and let them know there’s a problem.

RAW Album

After a day full of shooting, we know it’s annoying to sort through a camera roll to find the favorite photos you want to edit. To speed things up, RAW photos are now added to a ‘RAW’ album in a user’s Photos library.

Advanced Formats and TIFF Capture

By popular demand, we’ve added a few advanced format options within Settings. For users worried about compatibility with HEIC, it’s now possible to switch from “Most Efficient” to “Most Compatible” and Halide will use JPEG.

In situations where Halide can’t shoot RAW, we offer MAX mode, which saves a HEIC or JPEG in the highest quality setting. We now also have TIFF! It’s lossless, but uses 3x the storage.

Accessibility

Halide is the first manual camera app to support VoiceOver, Apple’s assistive technology for the visually impaired.

One more thing: A new icon!

You might have noticed our sharp new icon. This was some of Sebastiaan’s handiwork and part of our continued attempt to refine and polish every aspect of Halide. There’ll be another blog post about the design process behind the new icon.

Device Requirements:
* iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
* Requires iOS 10.0 or later
* 25.9 MB

Pricing and Availability:
Halide – RAW Manual Camera 1.6.0 is just $4.99 USD (or an equivalent amount in other currencies) and is available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Photo and Video category.

Halide – RAW Manual Camera 1.6.0
Purchase and Download (MAS)
Screenshot
App Icon

Halide is built by Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With. Ben is a former Tech Consultant to HBO’s Silicon Valley, and used to be the tech lead of Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Sebastiaan is an ex-Apple designer and photographer that runs the San Francisco design shop Rune, which recently designed the Nylas email client. All Material and Software (C) Copyright 2017 Chroma Noir LLC. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, macOS, iPhone, iPod, iPad and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners.