The wait is over – the first stage of Nemesis, the mystery project that the CyanogenMod team has been teasing for the last days, is the launch of Focal, a brand new camera app that will replace the existing application in future CM releases.
In terms of design, Focal takes cues from the general esthetic of Android, while when it comes to functionality, we're looking at an original, feature-rich interface that looks very intuitive to use.
The folks at Geek.com got their hands on a pre-release version of Focal, giving us an early glimpse of how the app will look and work. When firing up the app, users will only see one shutter button, that they will be able to keep pressed to take shots in quick succession, a feature that will reportedly work even on older smartphones without specific hardware requirements. Clicking or swiping anywhere on the image allows for manual focus selection.
By swiping up from the shutter button, users can open a menu that lets them pick between various shooting modes. These include regular photo, video, panorama, front facing cam, and Pic Sphere. All the modes work as you'd expect from their names; Pic Sphere is CyanogenMod's open source answer to Google's Photo Sphere, which is available on Nexus devices, and thanks to a recently leaked APK to most Jelly Bean devices. For all purposes, Pic Sphere works precisely like Google's app.
Swiping from the left of the display opens a settings menu, containing all the options and tweaks you'd expect from a feature rich camera application – HDR modes, ISO, flash settings, filters, time settings, etc. Clicking on the menu buttons opens up "widgets" on the screen, and you can have several widgets open at a time, for easy access to settings. We have to say, the widget implementation looks far more ergonomic than digging through menus, like you have to do on the TouchWiz camera and other apps.
The CyanogenMod team designed Focal to be modular, meaning that device maintainers can configure the settings presented in the menu, to match hardware configuration. That also means that maintainers will be able to easily add new features to the app, to keep up with the evolution of camera hardware.
CyanogenMod Focal will become available in the nightly builds of the ROM starting next week, according to Geek's Russell Holly. The app is only the first phase of Project Nemesis, and judging from what we've seen so far, a very ambitious one. Naturally, we anxiously look forward to the other niceties that the CM team will bring in the next phases of Nemesis.
What should CM Nemesis focus on next, in your opinion?
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