It’s been quite a summer. This pregnancy has been pretty miserable compared to my first; a combination of loosening ligaments and chronic lower back/hip issues has made walking extremely painful, and it’s been hard for Charlie to understand that I can’t play with him exactly like I used to. On the other hand, baby is healthy and the end is in sight with only 8 weeks to go!

Snapthread’s revenue dropped off considerably about two weeks ago, so I’m particularly eager to transition to a freemium model to see if that helps. In the free version you will be able to export videos up to 30 seconds long, with a watermark. You can create a longer movie and preview it, but if you try to share it, you’ll get a prompt to upgrade (before that there will be a noticeable warning in the UI when the duration limit is exceeded). This approach will give people a good sense of what the app can do, and while I realize I could probably get a higher conversion rate by being a little more limiting, I’d rather attract and retain a large user base. With all of the feature ideas I have, it’s very possible that more things will wind up behind the paywall in the future.

Speaking of features, I thought I’d list some of the things I’d really like to add to Snapthread as time goes on. Some of these I’ve mentioned before and others are new ideas.

• The ability to add text and stickers to clips
• The ability to select a specific section of a song
• The ability to adjust the crop rectangle of clips for any aspect ratio, not just square
• Support for still photographs (ideally with a Ken Burns effect)
• Basic video adjustments: contrast, brightness, saturation, color balance, etc.
• An option for at least one type of transition (fade, dissolve, etc)
• A simpler way to loop a video multiple times (this is currently possible by just adding the same clip more than once)
• The app should cache the most recent project so it can be restored in case of a crash
• A way to “intelligently” auto-generate a video from a recent Moment

Honestly, that’s probably a couple year’s worth of features right there, at the rate that I’m able to work on it. 

I once stated that Snapthread’s mission was “to provide the fastest, most intuitive way for people to merge Live Photos and videos for the purpose of compiling and sharing their memories,” and to that end I want to make sure that any features I add don’t clutter up the interface. It will be a careful balancing act but I already have plans to streamline the clip-editing UI so that it’s easier to perform multiple edits quickly.

Anyway, I feel like I’m just rambling now, so: look for Snapthread 1.8 to arrive around the time iOS 12 is publicly released (with a pretty new icon, too!). After that, it’s anybody’s guess as to when I’ll be able to get another version out (besides bug fixes) because Baby Girl Hansmeyer will be here October 15th!