Aperture

A native iOS still camera with a small, deliberate film vocabulary: responsive capture, camera-style lens stops, local development, and a private Lab for the resulting photographs.

Current v1

• SwiftUI shell with AVFoundation capture/movie recording and UIKit camera preview.
• Rear/front camera switching, tap focus/exposure, flash modes, ramped zoom, and device-dependent lens stops.
• Four built-in recipes: 1998, Night, Cinema, and Digicam. Digicam v7 keeps colour neutral, with punchy flash contrast, coarse shadow texture, restrained warm highlights, and a subtle vignette; the film recipes add halation, chromatic aberration, optional light leaks, and date stamps.
• Photo Quality is captured into each applied recipe as a JPEG compression quality, so re-development remains reproducible after Settings change.
• Capture bytes are committed locally before development. Development is deferred off the camera/session path and can be retried.
• Photo mode and short-film mode (with synchronized microphone audio), capped at 60 seconds per clip. Developed films play in detail view and can be shared/exported to Photos.
• App-sandbox media library, optional original preservation, Favorites, share/export, deletion, thumbnail cache, recovery, and legacy Documents/photos migration. Legacy deletions are kept in a durable tombstone ledger; a corrupt ledger pauses migration safely.
• No accounts, analytics, ads, or uploads. Camera and microphone are used only for capture; Photos export uses add-only permission.

Video processing uses a file-backed movie input and a temporally stable Core Image treatment. A generated tiny-movie test exercises successful rendering and validates a playable output in Simulator; actual capture, microphone/audio sync, thermal/pressure behavior, lens/flash behavior, and playback/export on captured media remain physical-device release gates. See release engineering.

Build and test

xcodebuild -project Aperture.xcodeproj -scheme Aperture \
  -sdk iphonesimulator -configuration Debug build
xcodebuild -project Aperture.xcodeproj -scheme Aperture \
  -sdk iphonesimulator -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 16 Pro' test

The simulator can cover UI, storage/recovery/migration, recipes, and deterministic processing. Camera capture, microphone/audio sync, thermal/pressure behavior, flash, lens availability, and Photos export of captured media require a physical iPhone. See release engineering.

Documentation

• Architecture
• Release engineering and device checklist
• App Store release runbook
• Roadmap
• Local Film Lab: a Mac browser tool for tuning the 1998 look with the app's renderer
• Historical research and build context
• Contributor notes