Crown + Flint Update Week 13 2024

We’re finally reaching the end of beta testing for the next release of Crown + Flint, and I’m very excited to share what’s coming.

Release 4 🏜️ “The Voice”

Improved auto-suggest

One fun feature is that Crown + Flint knows a lot of camera manufacturers and film stocks. The app uses this knowledge to make suggestions when you enter a new camera or a new film, saving you time. But, for reasons that are largely beyond my understanding, on several Android devices and a handful of iPhones, the auto-suggest feature slows the app down so badly it becomes unusable.

The situation is so bad it is severely impacting the app rating on the Google Play Store. All of my attempts at fixing it so far have failed, however. So I ripped out every last data-entry form, and re-wrote them from scratch using a completely different mechanism for the auto-suggest feature. Getting this right took a lot of time, not least of which is because Bene Gesserit training in The Voice is a tedious procedure (get it? GET IT!?). But beta testers who suffered from the slowdown tell me that this time, the fix works!

Auto-suggest has now also been expanded to lens mounts, so when you add a new Pentax to your collection of Pentaxes, you don’t have to keep typing “K”. Much effort saved. This feature only uses the mounts on the cameras you’ve already added to your collection.

Swipe through your frames

Once a roll is done, you probably like to look at each shot you took. But it’s tedious to have to hit back, find the next shot in the roll, and tap it…thirty-six times. Now you can swipe through your frames quickly.

Edit a shot’s geolocation

Previously, you could edit every detail about a shot you took…except where you took it. Now you can. You can even remove a location with a long-press.

More bugfixes than you can shake a stick at

• Editing apertures and shutter speeds in your cameras and lenses was overly complicated, and the codebase would make a lot of weird mistakes.
• It’s now possible to add cameras with only full-auto settings, or a single fixed shutter speed or aperture.
• Sometimes even though you’ve granted permission to track your location, we couldn’t get it from the system and would unceremoniously crash.
• If you created a new location to store your film, and moved it to the top of the list, it would get forgotten.
• Date range filters would exclude films on the last day of the range.
• If you tried to sort your films by last shot date, but there was a film with no shots on it, we would crash, and then refuse to start up ever again.
• It used to be possible to add a camera and lens combination that had no shutter between the two. At least one has to have a shutter! This is better enforced.
• Sometimes taking a reference picture would fail spectacularly. Now it fails more silently.

Release date?

When is R4 being released? When it’s done. Which, honestly, should be any day now—I’m aiming for a release in Week 14, so very soon!

That’s it for this week! I hope you’re looking forward to R4 as much as I am. If there’s anything you want to know or add, please reach out in the comments below, or better yet, in the Discord community.