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Cover image for Tiny Softbox — Simple light box & color panel
Alexander Sandberg
Alexander Sandberg

Posted on • Originally published at alexandersandberg.com

Tiny Softbox — Simple light box & color panel

Not too long ago I made the decision to switch careers from cross-platform mobile development (React Native) to native iOS development (Swift). I will talk about why in a future post (if I ever get around to writing it).

As I love learning new stuff by building things, one of the things I did to learn Swift and SwiftUI was to build an app.

After joining Practice at the end of 2021, where my colleagues are mostly located in North America, I now have most of my video calls for work when it's dark outside. Due to bad lighting in my office, I made a quick web app to fix this.

I realized this would make for a perfect first app built in Swift, and a few days later of tinkering with SwiftUI (which I absolutely love, btw), Tiny Softbox was born.

App Store screenshot of Tiny Softbox

It's a very simple app, but it works very well for its purpose. And other than helping with lighting during video calls, the app can also be used for a bunch of other use cases, from photography to reading.

App Store screenshot of Tiny Softbox, showing off different use cases for the app

After experimenting with free apps before (Tiny Weather), I decided to make Tiny Softbox a paid app—mostly due to my curiosity for learning about the differences between publishing free vs. paid apps. I priced it at $2/€2, which I thought was a reasonable price considering that you get it for both macOS and iOS with a single purchase.

It's currently available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but I'm considering making an Apple TV app as well.

For the launch of Tiny Softbox, I tweeted about it and launched it on Product Hunt the day after that. The engagement was not amazing, but the feedback I got was very positive, and from the App Store impressions and sales it seems to be off to a great start.

I love building tiny (but useful) apps like this and hope to find time to build many more. I have a long list of ideas. 🙂

👉 Tiny Softbox


This post was originally published on my website at alexandersandberg.com.

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