New to Find? Here's everything that's happened in the past several years.
Find now includes an iMessage extension!
Find is also now listed under Find App, Inc. 🎉
Once again rebuilt from the ground up, this version offers Smart Albums and super fast search
Technical note: v3 is built with almost 100% SwiftUI. This helped a lot with the animations.
Btw — if you find a photo that consistently crashes the app, could you please email it to me (aheze@getfind.app)? I've had some reports of corrupted photos but haven't been able to pin down the problem.
Rebuilt completely from scratch. This version focused on Photos and text search. Lists also got a huge upgrade with a redesign editor and sharing support.
However, ever since Apple added Live Text during WWDC21 (just before Find 1.2.8), Find has been kind of irrelevant. Why not just use the built-in Photos app? It was back to the drawing board and time to plan v3...
Introducing… photo notes! Add custom, searchable labels to your photos, keeping everything organized. This version also comes with some other updates:
Faster photos! But still not fast enough. I finally fixed the slow loading issue for good in v3.
At our school's coding club we've been learning Swift and SwiftUI. The /strawberry and /gradient commands were made by our club members, and I added them into Find.
We're just about to launch our actual app, a Clash Royale soundboard (Clash Royale is a mobile game that most of the club members play). It did very well on reddit!
Edit: here's the download link!
A major redesign of Find. Started to actually look like an actual, usable app around this time.
Find's Discord is pretty cool. It's been active for almost 2 years now and every day people hop on. Also, there's Findbot! I learned Python just to make this bot. It's open source if you want to take a look (although I'm not sure why you'd want to, the code is horrible).
Great numbers this month
I’ve never had this much support for Find before. I’ve added a lot of your feature requests in this update, especially focusing on Accessibility.
Here’s some other new stuff:
And the bug fixes:
Here’s the current roadmap for future updates:
Now that Find has a website (this one!), I linked it in the app too.
Bug Fixes
A bunch of improvements to the camera
Bug Fixes
What’s New
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
UI Updates
Bug Fixes
1. Redesigned navigation - instead of a weird floating button, you now get a nice, clean tab bar.
2. Photos, Camera, and Lists each get their own tab - and you can swipe between them.
3. Complete user interface overhaul.
This time, we mainly focused on improving Photos.
4. Syncing - Photos is now linked to the built-in Photos app on your phone. This means that you can find from all your existing photos, and not just the ones saved from Find.
5. Filters - we added a slider where you can switch between the different types of photos, which are:
• Local - photos saved from Find
• Starred - photos that you’ve starred (do this for the ones that you view the most)
• Cached - cached photos, which churn out results instantly when you find from them
• All - all your photos
6. Refreshed gallery view - photos are now grouped by month instead of day, and displayed in a 4 column layout to take advantage of all available space
7. Resumable finding - you can now switch between the gallery view and the finding sheet without losing your place.
8. Cleaner finding - we polished up all the little shadows and corner radiuses… but also rethought the interaction, so everything is much easier to use.
9. Universal icons - photos will now have the Star or Cache icon everywhere, whether that’s in the gallery view, or the finding sheet.
10. Info sheet - shows the date taken and origin of a photo. Also, for cached photos, you can now copy their transcripts.
There’s even more, but let’s get to Camera.
11. Cleaner layout - gone are the popup and rings from 1.1. Now, the shutter button springs out from the tab bar, supported by 2 buttons at the corners. That animation took quite a while to make!
12. Shutter - we made a bunch of improvements here. Back in 1.1, all it did was take photos. But we realized that people would rather pause the preview, so that’s what it does now.
13. But that’s not all. When you pause the preview, the tab bar is replaced with the Save and Cache buttons.
14. Press Save to take a photo and save it to the photo library (we actually didn’t remove this feature!)
15. You can now also cache directly in the paused preview, getting you faster and more accurate results.
We redesigned Settings too!
16. More modern interface - redesigned to contrast beautifully with the camera, it now has an awesome dark theme.
17. More settings - we added levels for haptic feedback, so you aren’t stuck with just ON or OFF. There’s now also an option to turn off “Swipe to Navigate” if you don’t want to swipe between tabs.
18. Better help center - we’re now using SupportDocs, which is an open-source project of ours.
And finally, Lists.
19. We brought the design refresh to Lists, too - you’ll get more vivid colors and a more fluid experience.
20. The icon gallery view now has 8 columns, making it easier to pick the one you want. We’ve also made the header sticky, so you always know which category you’re browsing.
21. Code-level improvements - Lists in the previous version had a lot of redundant code. We’ve optimized it for a faster and more efficient program.
Well, that’s pretty much all! And Find is still completely free with no ads, even almost a year later. Enjoy, and keep the reviews coming!
For several months I watched a bunch of anime. Distance Learning meant that I had a bunch of spare time — school was via Zoom, and most teachers didn't even need us to turn on our camera. So anime it was!
Here's a list of all the titles that I watched around this time:
Made some updates during the summer. The app icon borders are also a bit rounder.
During the beginning of sophomore year it was COVID and stuff, so I started getting into a couple things.
One was open source. I released ProgressGif, my second app, on the App Store on Aug 9, 2020. This was a simple utility app that turned videos into gifs — I had a blog on Medium, and since Medium only allowed gifs, I had to convert all my screen recordings before uploading them. This was kind of annoying so I made an app for it. The defining feature was the progress bar — it automatically rendered a progress bar on top of the gif, so you can clearly tell when it starts or ends.
From ProgressGif I learned about size classes and got more comfortable integrating with Photos and AVFoundation. It's live on GitHub if you want to check it out.
General Improvements
Bug Fixes
My mom helped me with the Chinese translations. Thanks mom!
您好！We've translated Find into Chinese! However, only English and Pinyin are currently supported as input by the text recognition engine.
The first versions of Find make their way to the App Store.
I had some trouble with the build number, but it turned out fine!
After almost an year, Find is here! Thanks to everyone who supported me. Without you guys, Find would have just been a fleeting idea.
First commit was October 13, 2019. I had started learning Swift the winter prior (2018), when I bought a Mac mini. It was so slow! My dad helped me install an SSD — after that it was usable. I'd use this computer for another year, when I released v1 of Find.
I originally wanted to make Find because in 8th grade Spanish we were assigned a bunch of worksheets almost daily. It was busy work and didn't help much — all you needed to do was look through your textbook for the answers. But I didn't want to flip through all those pages and read line-by-line. So why not make an app?
The first app I wanted to make was actually something called "FariExcuse" — back in 7th grade I had a classmate called Fari that would make excuses all the time. I thought it would be cool to make an iMessage extension that generated random excuses when you needed them. I ended up making some designs, but didn't code anything.
Another app I designed pretty extensively was an iOS client for this game called agma.io — a complete agario knockoff, but it had faster gameplay and I really liked it.
I fished this out from this huge pile of old sketches. If you'd like to check out what I've been up to many years ago, ping me on Twitter and I'd be happy to take some pics.
- Andrew
