If there was ever an app that deserved a name change, it's this one. DonutCam gets its name from its 3x3 grid of rectangles with the center one used as the camera viewfinder. The outer eight rectangles are used to view the last images that have been taken. It's really more of a gimmicky app, rather than a useful photography tool.
The first thing that annoys me about this app is the user interface. You are first presented with a multicolored grid of rectangles. Each block is a different color only for the purpose of showing you that there are eight blocks to fill up with images. It just isn't very pretty.
You have two options when taking a picture. You can take a single shot, or multiple rapid-fire shots. If you take a single shot, it will show up in the first block. When shooting multiple photos, the app will continuously shoot and place a new photo in each of the eight outer blocks. However, the time between each shot is rather long, and there's no way to change the speed. Also, I encountered a bug where the app froze up while using the flash on the iPhone 4.
Once you have your blocks filled up, you can save them all to your photo library with one tap. There are no options for image resolution, and you can't edit anything before saving.
There are just too many things you can't do with DonutCam. There is absolutely no customization for rapid-fire speed, image resolution or image editing. Also, you can't even tap on your photos to see what they look like full-screen before you save them to the library. It's just not a very useful photography tool. However, it does get some credit for being free and having potential for the future. With some updates, it could be a very useful photo app.
de_creative
Hi,
Thanks for taking the time to review our DonutCam app! Indeed, we did intend it as a platform for future photo enhancements as you suggest. Note that you can take continuous pictures beyond the 8 blocks (they overwrite the thumbnail displays, but are saved internally), and then they all get saved at once when you later select the save pics button. Some users have told us that this enables the app to be used as a many-exposure panorama cam. This app was out of course before video features were available on the iPhone, so it is somewhat retrograde in that sense.
FYI: the separate save was done to enable faster continuous pic taking, versus saving to the Cam Roll during the pic taking process, which involves the slow image compression operation.
However, the iOS4 seems to be significantly slower on a 3G phone than previous iOS releases, which degrades the speed we had previously put in. Hopefully iOS4.1 will restore some of that speed!