Darkroom

I joined Darkroom in July 2022, having been a long-time user of the app. I was very excited to get to work on an app that I use very regularly because photography is one of my passions.

I've worked on many aspects of Darkroom for over four years, but I've mainly been responsible for implementing a lot of the user interface and new features.

Most recently, I worked on the Liquid Glass redesign, first for iOS, where I added new interactions and refined others, and then brought the Liquid Glass redesign to both iPad and macOS.

I also added other features, such as improving our intent support and Siri support. Apple featured us at WWDC24 and their September iPhone announcement.

Since we shipped Version 7, which took a while to work on because we were working on a new rendering engine in the meantime, I've been mainly maintaining the current app and making improvements here and there.

I also worked on the video editing tools, including different interactions and new interfaces there, as well as the export flow.

Earlier, I worked on the Mac Transform tool to improve that interface. I also had a goal to make our Mac Catalyst app feel more at home, as if it were an AppKit app, and to make our typography and different UI elements feel more at home on the Mac.

When I joined Darkroom, a lot of the app was written in Objective-C, and over time, more and more of the app has been rewritten in Swift and SwiftUI. Other parts of the app have also been migrated to newer systems. One of the big systems I worked on was our persistence layer and sync, which uses iCloud sync for presets and reject states, among other things.

As I said, photography is a big passion of mine, particularly film photography. One of the cameras I shoot with is a Leica M5, and one of my earlier projects in Darkroom was helping add camera app integrations. One of our big integrations was with Leica, which was a fun opportunity.

Part of my job has also involved spending time applying different AI models to the app, including reading papers, building the models locally, testing them locally, and making prototypes. I've built a few of these over the years, and some are coming to the app very soon.