We're from the Microsoft Pix team, and we are interested in your feedback. Happy to answer questions.
Pix also managed to take a fantastic Live Image of my sister and me, which is really special because I don't get to see her very often. Thanks to you all for that.
Chief area that I think needs improvement is on general speed optimizations, startup is slow and feedback when taking a shot could be clearer (i.e., when is it done after I hit the shutter?).
On W10m live photos are just too large (10-15MB) to be sent to others.
And if I were to wildly speculate, Apple phone owners are a more desirable demographic to pursue over the long run.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....
Windows phone (now w10 mobile) camera has supported these stuff for some years now (either natively or via extensions). Don't forget that "Live Photo" is Apples implementation of an old Nokia technology.
http://i.imgur.com/70wES9O.png
On a 56K modem that would take 1.5 hours to download...
It's a page about a camera app it probably needs to have images. And it creates animations so it's useful to include samples of that, right? I like to moan about website sizes as well but here it's sort of justified.
See http://www.bing.com as a counter example. They load in a beautiful animated background, far larger and higher resolution than any image on the Pix site. Total page size? 364KB. Yes, it's over 100 times smaller.
You can still have images and animations without it using absurd amounts of data. This is just sloppy optimization, especially for a mobile app where data usage is most important.
The average internet speed in India is 2.5mb/s, which is still 128 seconds. Just to download a webpage that's pretty extreme.
Second of all. I think there is something wrong with the top animation, it's very janky.
Sadly Microsoft management has shot themselves on both foots multiple times.
Disclaimer: Posting from my Lumia 640
Here's a little feedback.
As a shareholder, I get that not everything in research will be profitable... but I don't see how you'll be successful with this -- I don't see any ROI.
I've played with the application and in the cases that you've showcased, yes... if you have a light source behind people when taking a picture, the picture won't look great. You've come up with some clever software that helps that I guess? Playing around with it... it sure didn't do anything amazing when I was taking pictures of my dogs, and it didn't help me take better selfies -- I'll have to wait until tomorrow to test it on people.
As of right now I'm really scratching my head what the value of this is.
I know that's hard to hear, and I know it takes courage to post on Hacker News... but really guys, you're Microsoft. Figure out what you're trying to do, and put adequate resources into it. This WordPress site is pretty amateur... a flat image with text you can't read on a phone to advertise the benefits of a mobile app? No guys, that's just really really bad.
Do you not take pride in your work? Or were you rushed? Either way, why are you posting something half-baked here? You've got resources most companies on here would only dream of.