Arqball Spin lands on Android, fails in all areas possible
Arqball Spin is the software that turns a video of a spinning object into a web object that mimics 3D. It requires a rotating base, which I made for my own use back in May. Since then, I’ve been watching the iOS updates and waiting for the Android app, which finally arrived last week. On top of that, both versions of the app support external video imports, as well as variable base rotation speeds. Despite all of this, the Android app is a total miss.
The problems start the moment you fire up the capture screen and start looking for the camera controls, because, well, there aren’t any. Forget enabling the camera LED, set brightness, macro, or anything like that. It has a semi-working touch-to-focus feature, which seems to be about as effective as an ice cube in a volcano. There’s a pop-up to select rotation direction when you start “capturing,” which has the nice little side effect that it resets the focus point, so you might as well not bother. I eventually gave up trying to get the thing to work, and that’s with a more than decent Galaxy S II canera to work with.
That brings me to the part that outright ticks me off. The app has beta status, so issues like the above are to be expected, and I would happily have submitted a detailed bug report. In fact, that was my plan, and I figured I would record a video using the stock camera app and then import it into the app to compare. The video turned out great (proving my point about the camera settings issue), and it imported just fine … or so I thought. The thumbnail was there and showed the object I had filmed, but the actual “spin” was all black. I then tried to upload the spin to see if it would still be broken online, and was slapped with a message asking me to upgrade my plan to upload imported videos. Pay to use a beta that doesn’t really work? Yeah good luck with that one.
To add insult to injury, the lowest plan is $20/month. PER MONTH. What the heck do they think they’re selling? 10-packs of Dropbox accounts? That pricing basically puts it out of reach for anyone who wants to use this casually, which kind of makes it a big pointless joke in my opinion.
Suffice it to say, the app is off my phone. It’s not coming back unless the developer does a major reality check. I had such huge hopes for this, but between the price and the whole charging for a beta thing, I couldn’t care less about what happens to the Arqball Spin at this point.
Download: Google Play
