Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Bugshot

Bugshot is no longer available. I removed it from the App Store in late 2014 because doing a proper iOS 8 update with full Photo Library integration and an image-editing extension would require more time than its sales justified.

Quickly draw orange arrows and boxes on screenshots, then email or share them! Great for reporting bugs, web layout issues, article typos, and other visual issues to whoever’s responsible (even if it’s you).

Annotated screenshots can be saved back to your Camera Roll, emailed, sent in Messages, copied, posted to Twitter or Facebook, and more.

Why?

Whenever I see a bug in an app (usually one of mine), I take a screenshot, intending to deal with it later. But often, when I look back, I can’t remember why I took a particular screenshot.

Bugshot’s sole purpose is dealing with those screenshots better: being a home for them, making it easier to find them (rather than browsing your entire Camera Roll, interspersed with photos), and making it fast and easy to draw big orange annotations on them so it’s clear what needs attention.

In some ways, it’s reminiscent of what Skitch for Mac used to be good at. I always loved the old Skitch, but never found something that was as fast to get in and out of on iOS.

Why now?

Simple: I’m finding tons of rendering bugs in iOS 7. I’ve already used Bugshot many times to report bugs to app developers and Apple.

It was also a great practice-project for me to get back into app development after about six months away.

The icon

Bugshot’s icon is, itself, a rendering bug from an early version of the rectangle-drawing code. In a happy accident, two arcs went too far (because I hadn’t yet learned that radians go backwards around the circle in Core Graphics) and formed a “B”.

I screenshotted it, naturally, and saved the “buggy” drawing code into its own class to render the icon at any size, centered in a solid square in the app’s orange theme color.

The ironic rendering bug in 1.0

I know.

I added the grid overlay at the last minute to solve a tricky problem: how can you make it clear that you’re displaying a screenshot at actual size with your own additional UI on top?

I think this solution works well, but I completely neglected to test it in landscape, and the grid overlay doesn’t properly expand to the screen’s full width. Isn’t that embarrassing? Anyway, it’s fixed for 1.1.

Coming in 1.1

Version 1.1 has already been submitted to the App Store with many improvements:

It’ll be out as soon as it’s approved by Apple.

Bugshot includes the GPUImage framework by Brad Larson for the blur tool in version 1.1 and above.