Nova

Yo. Creator of Nova here. Can I get a green tick thingy? Happy to answer any questions about Nova. I created Nova last year because I wasn't happy with how the flash worked on camera phones. Ran a Kickstarter, got manufacturing setup, and now it's ready for everyone to buy. It's my first hardware product and I'd love feedback from the PH community.

Love this! Ever since I sold my DSLR and went all-iPhone for camera usage, I've been looking for a good indirect light solution. A couple questions: 1) Assuming this only works with the Nova app, and no other camera apps? 2) Battery life? 3) Any pro-tips for one-handed use?

@adamsigel 1. At the moment it only works with the Nova Camera app (Free in App Store: http://wantnova.com/appstore). However we have an open source SDK and we're keen to work with camera developers to integrate. https://wantnova.com/sdk/ 2. Battery life: 2 weeks on standby between charges. You can get about 500-1000 flashes out of it. Of course this totally varies by how much you use it, flash brightness, etc, but it should give you a rough idea. In practice I charge mine about once per week and it's always ready when you need it. 3. Some pro tips... 3a. For one handed use get yourself some of this micro-suction-cup-tape: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ITX9.... You can stick your Nova to the back of your iPhone and easily remove it when you need to without leaving any stick marks. I only discovered it last week and it's really handy! 3b. Use the hard volume buttons instead of touching the screen to take the photo. It's much more ergonomic.

@jongold I've looked into the new iOS8 extensions APIs and unfortunately there's no hooks that can be triggered while taking a photo (it's only post-processing stuff). Still, it's a great start and I hope Apple will expand this in iOS9.

@joewalnes Thanks for the responses! That adhesive looks really useful for a couple different things. I was originally thinking more about how to recreate a flash shoe so I could have the flash bounce off the ceiling, for example. I found this gooseneck clamp and it looks like it may work? One thing I'd like to see is a UGC gallery of shots taken with Nova. I've only found a handful of examples on your site and other reviews. It's pretty clear that it helps avoid the harsh light problem of the built-in iPhone 5s flash, but curious to see what else people are able to do with it.

@joewalnes with so many people doing software startups, I commend you for doing hardware! What's been the hardest part about building and selling something "real"?

@mijustin Thanks! I have a software background, so moving into hardware presented a lot of challenges. But 3 stand out: 1. Once it's shipped, it's shipped. Can't just release a beta and then continually upgrade. To mitigate a lot of this I've tried to keep the hardware side of things as simple as possible and do the smarts in the app, which will continually get better and better. 2. Manufacturing. Is hard. So many things that can possibly go wrong. Bad materials. Defects. Managing your supply chain. It's not like you can spin up new Heroku nodes. Don't do it alone - find a good manufacturing partner. 3. Logistics. I totally underestimated the complexity in shipping thousands of orders all around the world. For the past month pretty much 90% of my time working on the project has been dealing with shipping issues, customs, warehouse, supply, spreadsheets, integrating systems, etc. Yesterday we started selling on Amazon using fba.amazon.com : it's so much simpler.