Halide Mark II
With all that in mind, we’re confident launching Halide Mark II at $36 (for new users). To celebrate the launch, we are discounting it to $30.
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Pay-Once is not going away, but we’ve decided to offer an alternative that fits quite well into our long term plans. We’re calling it a membership. We think there are three reasons to consider a membership.
First, there’s price. $11.99 per year. […] Second, memberships include perks above and beyond the core Halide experience, like exclusive icons.
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Anyone who has already paid for Halide 1 gets Mark II for free. We’re also including a year of members’ updates.
The latest update is an ambitious reimagining of what was already a premier camera app, building on what came before but with a simpler and easier to learn UI. Halide Mark II puts more control than ever into the hands of photographers, while also making it easy to achieve beautiful results with minimal effort. Halide also seeks to educate through a combination of design and upcoming in-app photography lessons.
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One of my favorite changes to Halide is its focus control. Auto-focus is on by default, but you can swipe right on the control to manually set focus. When you enter manual focus mode, a magnifier loupe appears onscreen that zooms in on the center of the viewfinder, making it easier to precisely dial in focus. There’s also a button to turn the focusing loupe on full time and a focus peaking button to visualize focus status.
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Instead of saving the RAW and compressed images at the same time, which is what RAW+ does, Coverage takes two separate shots one after the other – one RAW, one compressed – and then saves them together in the same file as just like RAW+. The advantage is a higher-quality compressed image that can take advantage of Apple’s Smart HDR and Deep Fusion processing. The disadvantage is that it takes a little longer for the camera to take two shots in a row, which is why the feature is turned off by default.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
> We think there are three reasons to consider a membership.
> First, there’s price. $11.99 per year. Yes, year, not month. Long term, this is cheaper than buying future upgrades.
> Second, memberships include perks above and beyond the core Halide experience, like exclusive icons.
> Third, memberships allow us to offer things with ongoing costs in the future.
It's one thing to introduce subscriptions, but euphemistically calling them "memberships" just feels really dishonest. Agile Bits are doing it too with 1Password subscriptions, and it really rubs me the wrong way. Nobody is joining a club or becoming part of an organization; you are simply agreeing to recurring payments.
Those three "reasons", which are complete non sequiturs, just draw further attention to the fact that calling their subscriptions memberships does not make any sense -- other than misleading people about what the actual product is.
Ran into a real unfortunate bug where it asked me to subscribe or pay to continue even though I paid for the previous version. Fixed in the latest patch, but I hope not too many people saw that and felt robbed instead of realizing it’s a glitch.
@BillyOk Yeah, it sounds like they got bitten because App Store receipts (which they use to determine whether you already paid) don’t work the same way in the sandbox testing environment as in production.
@NSSynapse: That's what everyone else in the industry calls them. Look at Amazon Prime, Adobe Cloud, Nintendo Switch Online, Playstation Plus, Xbox Live Gold, or even Costco and Sam's Club. Paying for access a service is called a "membership". I don't think anyone is being misled.
