We're launching a brand new feature here on The Beginners Lens...a bit of a behind the scenes look at the world of app development! We recently downloaded the Photo Stats app with really high hopes - we love a good infographic around here. Doesn't everyone love a good infographic really? But after trying out the app, we struggled to get the results we wanted, so we took the opportunity to go straight to the source to find out a bit more about the company and the app itself. We figured it was a great way to get to know the developers a little bit better and of course give them an opportunity to tell us how we could use the app to get better results. 

[imageeffect type="frame" align="aligncenter" width="466" height="311"  alt="Photo Stats App " url="http://thebeginnerslens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/photostats.jpg"  ]#

We were lucky enough to get in touch with Mr Mladen Djordjevic, manager of Dear Future Astronaut who has some great insight into their company and their recently released Photo Stats app! 

<h4>How would you describe Dear Future Astronaut AB and what are the apps you offer?</h4>
Dear Future Astronaut AB is a creative mobile development company from Sweden, which also has a dev team in Serbia. We develop apps for both iOS and Android, focusing on using the unique advantages brought by smartphones to make users lives easier and more fun. The portfolio of apps we have developed so far includes Photopod – a free iPhone app which aggregates all photos shared on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Dropbox and Picasa, making all your photos always available to you, Scandinavian Speed Cam apps we developed for I&J, Photo World – set of apps for the biggest Scandinavian photo equipment store, Virgin Unite Hub iPhone app, Pingdom website monitoring Android app and several others. Mobile apps are our inspiration and each day we pick the coolest new apps and share them with other developers on our website Smashapp.com.

<h4>How many developers do you have on your team? Do you all work from the same location or are you globally based?</h4>

Photo Stats app was developed by a small team which made out of one designer, three developers, one copywriter/marketing guy and one manager for the project lead. The whole team for this project was based on the same location, but in general DFANY is formed out of two teams: one in Serbia and the other one in Sweden.

<h4>Can you tell us about Photo Stats' story: when, how and why it was created? Have you had success with the app to date?</h4>

At DFANY we believe that good apps are a combination of creativity and hard work. Therefore, we have this thing called ‘101 Dalmatians’ :) This is an intensive list of numerous one-liner ideas for new apps we all add on daily basis. Every once in a while, we go through the list, and the whole staff pick the ideas they like best, and then analyze each idea according to various criteria. By doing this we make sure that the app has three I-s: that it is Innovative, Interesting for the end-users and that it can be Implemented.

Photo Stats is one of the first product of such a process. After having chosen it as the best idea from the list, we first developed a prototype app, tested it against a huge number of images and when we saw that it is plausible, we began with the implementation.

To tell you the truth, a bunch of us are privately photo geeks and infographic lovers, so Photo Stats was a match made in heaven. The market was open for this kind of application and we went for it, creating the first infographic generator for iPhone.

As far as the number of downloads is concerned we can say that if we take into account that the audience for this kind of apps is not so wide as for example the audience for iPhone games, we are pretty satisfied with the numbers so far. From the last Thursday we have been featured as the App of the week on the Canadian App Store as well as Staff Favorite on US and 60 more stores worldwide, so we are pretty confident that the download numbers will continue to grow!

<h4>The Photo Stats app is a great idea. But it suffers a bit from the lack of exif information in photo files processed by apps. How do you intend to mitigate that problem for users?</h4>

Unfortunately, this is correct. Applications such as Hipstamatic are being pretty destructive when it comes to EXIF :) Our initial solution and the one that is implemented in the current version of the application is that the photos that are taken by Hipstamatic are not included into analysis for the infographic as they do not have valid EXIF data. We have contacted Hipstamatic and a couple of our users have done the same, but without any result at the moment. We are also planning to include an info dialogue which will inform users about problems with certain photo-taking apps. The truth is that the app can’t analyze the data which is not present within the image file, but we are working on putting more emphasis on presenting the information about this issue to the end users, so they understand why the numbers on the infographic don’t always match up with the numbers of actual photos they took.

<h4>What improvements will you be making to the app in the next update?</h4>
We are very excited about the next Photo Stats update, because it will add several really interesting features to the application.

1. Theming - Users will be able to choose among 5 fresh and colorful themes and thus personalize their infographics.

2. History browsing - Users will be able to define the period for which they want to create the infographic by choosing the start and end dates so they can create more infographics for example about last week, last month, etc.

3. New progress screen - We are aware that for those users who have a lot of photos on their device analysis of the data takes some time and so the progress screen is there for quite a bit, so we will add a couple of animations and make it fun.

These are features which will be added in the next update of Photo Stats which should be available on the App Store in the next two weeks. Our plan is to improve the app as the time goes and surprise users with new features from time to time so we already have several new features in plan which should be added to the version 2 of the app planned to be released in October.

Get more info on the Photo Stats app <a href="http://photostatsapp.com/" title="Photo Stats App">here</a>, or <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id452201241?mt=8" title="Download the Photo Stats App">download the app</a> and try it yourself!