Apple Buys SnappyLabs, the One-Man Company Behind SnappyCam Burst Shooter App

Apple has acquired app developer SnappyLabs, a company (of sorts) behind the popular app SnappyCam, which snaps full resolution pictures on the iPhone at up to 30 frames per second.

SnappyCam can take pictures at full resolution much faster than the iPhone's own native camera, which gives Apple's acquisition the sense that "if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em." However, the "company" Apple bought is actually just one guy, according to TechCrunch.

John Papandriopoulos, (a.k.a. SnappyLabs) an electrical engineering PhD from the University of Melbourne figured out how to essentially turn the iPhone into a DSLR-type rapid-fire shooter by engineering a new algorithm to expand the capabilities of the iPhone's processor and then painstakingly tweaking tens of thousands of lines of code. Here's  Papandriopoulos's account of how the process:

"First we studied the fast discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithms...We then extended some of that research to create a new algorithm that's a good fit for the ARM NEON SIMD co-processor instruction set architecture. The final implementation comprises nearly 10,000 lines of hand-tuned assembly code, and over 20,000 lines of low-level C code. (In comparison, the SnappyCam app comprises almost 50,000 lines of Objective C code.)

JPEG compression comprises two parts: the DCT (above), and a lossless Huffman compression stage that forms a compact JPEG file. Having developed a blazing fast DCT implementation, Huffman then became a bottleneck. We innovated on that portion with tight hand-tuned assembly code that leverages special features of the ARM processor instruction set to make it as fast as possible."

By buying Papandriopoulos's company, Apple is essentially buying his app and probably employing him to work on more camera software for the iPhone, but possibly for Apple's computer line as well.