An Engineer

We released version 1.3 of the Phanfare iPhone App that focuses on rounding out the sharing features available from the application.

• You can now add friends and family from the app
• You can accept connection requests from the app
• Your Phanfare newsfeed, telling you about photos and videos in your circle, is now available from the app.
• You can signup for Phanfare from the app; not important to existing users but great for new users.

As always, you can view your own photos, create albums, set security on new albums and caption your photos. Videos don’t play within the app, although they do play if you browse to your account using Safari on the iPhone.

This release also addresses stability problems in the previous version. The app was dying suddenly when it hit memory limits on the phone. We don’t have complete control over memory usage but we did trim down the footprint a bit. The phone seems to provide less memory to applications after the phone has been running for a period of time. Restarting the phone alleviates the issue.

Apple has publicly said that some of these issues will be addressed in future firmware releases for the iPhone. In the interim, we now show a message if memory is running low to warn you that you will need to serialize your photo taking (we normally overlap more operations to reduce latency).

We will continue to optimize the memory foot print of the Phanfare app to improve its performance and decrease the likelihood it gets killed by the operating system for memory usage. We are also hoping that the underlying iPhone libraries become leaner and faster over time to improve performance.

We would love your feedback on the Phanfare iPhone app. We have a whole list of things we want to do with it, but we don’t see it with fresh eyes as some of you will.

Please comment on this post if you want to discuss the direction of the app.