Apptisan #031 — Talking with 65×24’s Creator: From Apple Designer to Independent Developer - Bringing the XPan Film Camera’s Wide-Format Magic to iPhone
For our 31st edition, we welcome Guillaume, a former Apple designer turned indie developer. A passionate photographer, Guillaume founded Héliographe studio after leaving Apple and developed 65×24.
Name: 65×24
Developer / Team: Héliographe
Platforms: iOS
Read this newsletter issue in Chinese (中文) .
Please describe your product.
65×24 is a camera app for your iPhone that shoots natively in the 65:24 (2.71) panoramic format.
The aspect ratio of a photo is the foundation for the story it tells and impressions it conveys, and shooting in this ultra panoramic format makes you approach photography in a completely new way.
You’re probably used to the panoramic mode of your iPhone’s stock camera app, which requires you to move the phone during capture; but you can’t preview the full photo as you’re taking it, and because it’s merging multiple shots, it often creates undesirable artifacts in the final picture. The user interface of 65×24 is designed from the ground up for letting you compose panoramas precisely, captured in a single shot for clean results.
I designed the app to be a snapshot experience, where you can just capture great photos with a single tap - no need to fiddle with any complicated settings. Switching cameras or adjusting exposure compensation remains one tap away. And for more experienced users, there’s a whole lot of advanced interface customization settings, support for iPhone photography features like 48 MP capture and Camera Control, and a processing system that lets you define the appearance for your photos in-camera.
Was there a pivotal moment that inspired your product’s creation?
There are 2 distinct threads of inspiration that I can trace back the origin of this app to.
The first one goes back a few years - looking at a zoomed in a picture that filled the screen of my iPhone XS, I realized that panoramic shots looked absolutely beautiful on the tall screens of modern phones. I had been shooting film panoramas for a while, and this realization made me want to shoot more digital panoramic photos.
The other source of inspiration was using a Hasselblad XPan - a unique film camera that released in the 90s and pioneered the 65:24 aspect ratio. This camera has become an absolute cult classic - I loved using one and the results I got from it, but it is bulky, expensive, fragile, and shooting film comes with its own set of constraints. I wanted a digital alternative that would let me shoot in this format with the camera that’s in my pocket at all times - my iPhone. I had just quit my job so I was free to experiment with personal projects, and that’s when 65×24 was born.
What makes your product unique compared to others in the market?
A few pro camera apps let you set a custom aspect ratio, but their interfaces are designed for the iPhone camera’s native 4:3 aspect ratio, which means it becomes cramped and awkward to use when set to a panoramic aspect ratio.
When I first shipped 65×24, it was the first and only app of its kind on the App Store. A few other XPan cameras have cropped up since I launched, but none of them feature both the straightforward UI and advanced settings, customization, and processing options that 65×24 has.
How have you marketed your product, and what key lessons have you learned?
Marketing is by far the maker skill I am weakest at - I’d much rather be programming or designing - so it’s been a learning experience for me.
But I’ve just been experimenting with everything - over the last few months, I started using all the major social networks (Bluesky, Threads, X) to promote my apps, and that’s been bringing a steady flow of new people to my work. I also started a YouTube channel where I’ve been posting videos of my apps, as that helps people understand what it is before downloading it. I launched on Product Hunt last week, and that was a great way for a new wave of photographers to discover the app. I’ve also been featured on a few newsletters, including this one :)
I’d say the key lessons so far are:
Be consistent, try to engage a little every day. It’s tempting to think marketing is about the big launch or major feature announcement, but it’s really all about the slow, steady flow that then builds up to those bigger moments.
Everything you share is an opportunity to tell a story about your product - so you constantly have to be thinking about what the 1-2 most important points you want to communicate are. It can feel like you’re repeating yourself a lot, but you have to keep in mind that most people have never heard of your product before, and are encountering it for the first time - so clarity is key.
Don’t release anything without thorough communication around it. It’s better to release smaller features one by one with a clear story that you take the time to tell every time, rather than batching it all in one huge update with a bunch of stuff that you don’t get to showcase properly.
What has been some memorable feedback since your product’s release?
My absolute favorite was seeing photographer Ermanno Fissore making prints for a gallery show of shots he took with 65×24. It’s so rare to see photography make the jump from a screen to the real world these days, I was so happy that a camera app I built gave him results that he felt he could print.
More generally, I get a rush anytime I see a photographer share something they captured with 65×24 - a huge joy with building creative tools is seeing what people make with them.
Are there any products out there that you feel deserve more recognition?
Oh man, so many things!
One of my favorite apps of all time is Looom, a little animation sketchbook for iPad. It’s not as advanced or well known as more advanced animation tools like Clip Studio Paint or Procreate Dreams, but it has a unique interaction model that works really well for quickly sketching out animations. To me, it’s a perfect example of how small indie creative apps can experiment and offer unique experiences in ways that bigger software can’t.
The world of musical instruments and synthesizers is particularly inspiring, as they also solve complex interface problems in the aim of serving artists and creativity. Monome is a little company I respect a lot as they produce beautiful instruments, fabricated with great care, and they have really innovated with their interfaces.
I try to get lots of inspiration from designers and products outside of photography and tech, and even though I design software I find myself more drawn to physical objects and traditional craftsmanship. There’s something about a centuries-old ceramic vase or woodblock print that moves me in ways that pixels can’t.
Can you walk us through your typical design process from concept to completion? What tools and methodologies do you rely on?
For sure! I’m a huge believer in trying ideas on the device they are meant for, in the real world, as quickly as possible. Especially for camera apps that are going to be used in all sorts of circumstances (for example while wearing gloves in the cold, or in harsh sunlight that might make the screen harder to see), it’s super important to not be spending all your time designing screens in your cozy office on a computer screen.
To that end I will typically start by making a small prototype that captures the essence of my idea. For example this is a screenshot of the original 65x24 prototype I made, almost 2 years ago now.
It is literally just a viewfinder with a few buttons on the side - but just going for a walk in my neighborhood with this prototype in hand taught me all sort of things. It validated the initial product vision, and gave me all sorts of inspiration for what additional features would make sense. If I get tons of ideas while using such a simple prototype, I know I’m onto something interesting.
Once I have a feel for the core vision, and know it works in the way I intend, I will spend time in a more traditional design tool (I personally like Sketch), trying different ideas around UI layout and appearance. That’s where I spend time making lots and lots of alternative designs for each idea, to really explore what it could be.
Finally, I try to get other people to try it fairly early on, to make sure that I’m on the right track, see how they use the interface, what isn’t immediately clear to them, and so on.
I am my own #1 user - I design software to solve my own needs and wants, and I use it obsessively. My reasoning is that if I make something unique that I personally love to use, then surely some other people will appreciate it too.
I’ve actually shared a number of behind-the-scenes insights about how I designed 65x24 on my personal website, so check it out if you want to dig deeper!
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you envision for the future.
I’m Guillaume, an independent software designer currently living in Tokyo. I was a designer/prototyper at Apple for many years, and after I quit my job I went the independent developer route. As I am a long time photographer, I decided I would build photography software, and that’s how my company Héliographe was born. I’ve released other camera and photography utility apps besides 65×24, so if you’re into photography, check them out!
For the future, there are more feature updates planned for 65×24, and I have a number of new projects in the works, including a collaboration with Nuevo.Tokyo on a black & white film emulation app, AgBr.
I feel like too much modern software is designed to be like a “magic box”, where you press a button and a great result comes out. This can be fun and immediately rewarding, but it’s not a model that lets you build true expertise in the long run. I’m a big believer in tools that maybe come with a bit more of a learning curve, but enable you to develop knowledge and understanding of the underlying details, and really be in control of your creative process. I would like for the software I build to bring a little more of that mentality into the world.
As someone who transitioned from Apple to independent development, what aspects of large-company product development do you still apply, and what have you deliberately chosen to do differently?
That’s a fantastic question. Obviously the fundamentals of good design don’t change. But because I worked as a designer/prototyper, my job was really to focus on exploring visual/interaction design concepts for future hardware, and I could spend weeks or months really digging deep into something and getting it just right.
That’s still what I love to do, but as an indie developer who just started launching my own products, I don’t have the luxury of spending as much time on it - I also have to do the core engineering, marketing, customer support, etc. So I really have learned to prioritize, and be more precious with my time. I hope that over time, as my work gets a bit more established, I can spend a bit more time deep in the R&D weeds.
The quick iteration approach I described earlier in this interview - making things quickly, showing them to people as early as possible, and learning from their feedback - is a process that was really drilled into me by my former team (I even gave a WWDC talk about it!), and that I still follow to this day. If anything I can do it even more freely now, because I am not bound by the Apple product development secrecy anymore - I’ve had to retrain myself to share things more openly.
What I miss the most is having a team to share things with daily, and world experts I could reach out to across the hall. If I had some random question about something like camera optics, I could just ask people who spent years (or even decades!) designing iPhone camera lenses. Now I’m on my own, and so I’ve been trying to build more of a personal network to recreate this.
On the other hand, what I love the most now is that I can finally design interfaces that don’t look like Apple products at all! Being in a prototyping team at Apple we had more latitude than most when it came to designing atypical interfaces, but at the end of the day things had to fit within the general Apple aesthetics and design language. Now I can go in any direction I want - and that’s why I’ve been doing things like experimenting with monospaced fonts, designing interfaces that are more information dense, and present more technical information. I’m not going to beat Apple at making Apple-like interfaces, so that frees me up to be wilder with my design directions.
About Apptisan
Apptisan is a portmanteau of “application” and “artisan”, signifying “a weekly exploration into the world of apps and the passionate artisans who create them.” Each issue is a conversation with global creators, aiming to uncover and present intriguing products to a wider audience.
For those who prefer Chinese, you can subscribe via Quail. Creators interested in featuring their products are encouraged to submit them through our form, and we’ll be in touch promptly.
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