Marek Moi created PointOut [App Store] last year and I had the privilege to be one of the first people to see and write about it. I rarely fall in love with something, but Marek has hit the nail on the head with PointOut — I don’t use it everyday, but when I do, it does almost everything that I want it to. I wrote more extensively about the app last year in May…

PointOut for iOS from Indie Developer Marek Moi

 

Others have also found a use for it, like Ally Kazmucha from The App Factor — she uses it illustrate screenshots in her tutorials and workflows. I pulled the screenshot below from her site…

I spoke with Marek at length about the future of PointOut. He’s currently evaluating the direction in which he wants to take the app, which is completely understandable — he has plenty of ideas himself, but he’s constantly bombarded with specific requests from his users, which make it that much harder to make a good decision. As far as I know, he’s contemplating a complete UI rewrite for 2.0, to make the app easier and more intuitive to use. Sounds like a colossal undertaking…

I suggested that the next feature should be a Photo Extension, so that images could be modified directly from Apple’s Photos.app. An Action Extension would not go amiss either. What I would really love is what Ally’s screenshot illustrates perfectly — the ability to add a few images, define the whitespace around them (so that they don’t touch) and add the appropriate loops, all in one place. I doubt that will happen though — this was supposed to be a small side project for Marek and it’s already turned out to be a huge undertaking.

PointOut 1.4

In the meantime, PointOut 1.4 has been released on the App Store, with a few new features:

• 3D Touch Quick Actions
• the ability to add up to three loupes when using Layout .05
• custom URL schemes for apps like Launch Centre Pro (PointOut://, PointOut://pasteboard, PointOut://recent, PointOut://camera, PointOut://library)
• an optional solid colour background in addition the three current options
• a new save button on the iPad’s Share Sheet

As I was preparing to showcase the new loupes, I decided to choose a pretty hefty 36 MP image from a Nikon D800 that I reviewed a while back. The shot you can see above weighs in at about 20 MB and is over 7000 pixels wide. I chose it so that I could zoom in a lot and not lose detail or have a pixelated image. What I didn’t realise at the time was how good of a test this was for PointOut. From a technical point of view, the image is loaded four times in that above image, which is a total of around 80 MB. Another one is generated when exporting, for a final total of five images loaded into memory at the same time. Yet despite this, PointOut is extremely responsive and works flawlessly.

I sent a lot of suggestions Marek’s way recently and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with in the future. Give the app a shot — it really is very well done. Oh, and make sure to get him a coffee to unlock everything. Or a few more if you really like his app!

★ PointOut – iOS – Photo & Video – €0.00 →