iPhone App Development: Building An iPhone Time Lapse Video App

“Change is the only constant”, said the great philosopher Heraclitus; and we all realize how the quote finds itself a fit in our daily life. Everything around us is changing.

Watching things transforming on physical terms is an experience for a lifetime. Be it the construction of your home or the changing climate, the physical changes they undergo is worth a watch.

Most people prefer to capture these gradual transformations on their phone cameras to admire them for the rest of their life. While a frame by frame summary of the moments turns out to be a time-consuming process, Time Lapse has made things easier now.

Here we can see such an example:

 Source: Giphy

We can see the cactus growing flowers and blooming them in a few seconds. In reality, we know the entire process would have taken a few days. The slowness in the process can be inferred from the background that switches from the day to night and then back.

Our iOS app developers at The Brihaspati Infotech had the opportunity to build a unique video app which can help users create time-lapse videos on the iPhone.

What does the iPhone Time Lapse Video App do?

Time-Lapse Video applications have become popular across all the known Android and iOS Gadgets. 

The iOS-based Timelapse app can compress age-long videos to a few seconds. It keeps a check on the number of frames being clicked every second. While the ordinary videos maintain around 30-40 frames a second, the time-lapsed videos reduce the frame count to merely 1-2 frames at the same time. The reduced number of frames helps them to compress long videos by several folds.  

The application is particularly in use by social media enthusiasts who love observing changes for long time periods on a go. Researchers, travelers, nature-lovers, etc. to be named a few. 

Key Features of our iPhone Time Lapse Video App

The mobile app we developed is based on the iOS platform and behaves the opposite of how a slow-mo camera works. The motive behind building such an app is to allow the user to easily create video projects that let the user capture 1 sec, 2 sec & 3-sec clips for every day of their lives.

This mobile app makes it fun and easy for your users to relive their favorite memories every day. The user can add music to the video clips and later create a video that they can share with their friends and the rest of the world. The best part is that you can create multiple time-lapse video projects from a single App.

Let’s walk you through the main features of our iPhone time-lapse video app:

1. No Sign-up or Login Process

User does not need to sign up or log in into the mobile-based time-lapse app by using their personal information. This saves the user from sharing private details with third-party owners.

2. Create Multiple Projects

The iPhone time Lapse Video app allows the user to create multiple projects or select the existing project details to create videos. The Landing screen of the application consists of two selection options – New Project and Existing Project.

New Project: –The iPhone application asks the user to name the new project. The application checks the details of the newly created project with the ones in the Existing Project list. If the details seem identical, the application displays an alert message to change the project name; otherwise, the desired project is created.

Existing Project: – Under this section, the iPhone application displays a list of the existing Projects. Once selected, the time-lapse application displays the calendar view month-wise with dates/ days and the Video Images. Once a user selects any particular date or taps on a day, the application will display a video edit section.

Here from the user can edit videos of the existing projects.

3. Selecting video made easier

Our iPhone Time Lapse Video App offers a good number of filters for editing the time-lapsed videos. Here are a few time filters that help the user choosing the right clips:-

• Past 1 Year
• Past 1 month
• Past 7 days
• Custom

Applying filter lets the user find videos way quicker. The application searches the video clips and lets the users create a clip out of it.

4. Calendar View for arranging the videos (Month-Wise)

Our developers came up with the idea to arrange the media files. They introduced the class “Calendar” which eventually helped them to arrange the images and videos.

The user can easily locate the desired videos from the Calendar View of the iPhone based Application.

The user can store and retrieve data from the cloud server on the Calendar view screen.

On the Calendar View Screen, an option is available for the user where they can select the ‘cloud’ option to retrieve data from the cloud server plus select the clip length. The following are the clip length options available.

• 1 Sec Video: The IOS time-lapse video application allows the user to create videos of length 1 second. 
• 2 Sec and 3 Sec Videos: Our developers have restricted the access to paid users only. The users can make clippings of length 2 seconds or 3 seconds from these options.

5. Video Editing Features

Users can add text, location, date to each clip, add images with the video and track matching.

The user can add Audio to the video clips from this part. The full version lets the user add a Black and White background to the videos and remove Watermark.

6. Different Video layouts

The user can select different layouts to make creative video clips. There are three types of layout types that are present in the ‘setting’ section of the app – Horizontal Layout, Vertical Layout, and the Square Layout. Our developers had to make sure that the quality of the clip remains unaffected with modifications in the layout type.

7. App Upgrade and Monetization

The clients can make money from both the versions of the iPhone app, i.e. the free and the paid.

We have integrated Google Mobile Ads SDK that lets the owners flood the display with third-party Ads without hampering the basic functionalities much. The users can free themselves from Ads by upgrading to the paid version.

With the in-app purchase, the user is allowed to use the iPhone app to the fullest. The extra features in the full version of the app are:

• Unlocking All Music Options
• Unlimited Clips to choose from 
• Unlock 2 & 3 Second Clips creation modes
• Randomization to allow quicker searching of images and videos
• Remove the annoying watermarks from the videos
• Remove final slide image
• Remove the vexing third-party ads

The application comes with a one-time payment, worth of $4.99.

How we developed an iPhone Time Lapse Video App?

Our expert iOS developers built an iPhone app in Swift with the main goal to let their users engage on social media channels in a very interactive manner. The development process involved certain challenges that were resolved by our team in a strategical way.

Here’s a list of challenges we faced:

• There was a need to fetch images and videos from the mobile’s default photo gallery. To accomplish this, our iOS developers used the PH Photo Library of IOS.

On the calendar view, the mobile application displays 3 types of symbols: Camera, Video Camera, and Plus (+) Icon. When a user selects a particular icon, the application will check for any image or video recorded by the user in the iPhone’s default gallery and ultimately display the same.    

On selecting the ‘+’ icon, the application will allow users to select random images and videos to convert them into clips.

• Adding video edit features like music, images with video, text, etc. was another challenge. We achieved this by using the AV Mutable Composition IOS class.
• For adding special effect feature – Black & White Video, our iOS development team used the CI Filter class to get the effect.
• Another hurdle was to add a video clip with audio. For this, we needed to store a list of music provided by the client in the app. And for storing the Music listing, we used IOS Bundle Class.
• In the case of cloud images and videos, our iOS development team used the IOS default library, PH Photo Library Smart Album. This helped them to fetch images and save videos on the Cloud Server.

This app is available for both iPhone and iPad devices. Here’s how it can look on the tablet version.

Final thoughts on the iPhone Time Lapse Video App

The end results were pretty satisfactory as our team successfully overcame the hurdles and delivered this app to the client. Our iPhone Time Lapse Video App can be used for entertainment as well as professional purposes. The app can help you to make your social media interactions more interesting.

Our app developers at The Brihaspati Infotech have years of experience in iPhone and Android app development. In case you want to get an app designed by us, feel free to reach our iPhone mobile app development team.