My Entry: SantaSnaps

December 21st, 2006

My entry for Cocoa Duel is something I quickly threw together called SantaSnaps. It's pretty much a clone of Photo Booth sans most of the actual features, but with a little holiday twist.

SantaSnaps screenshot

A big thanks goes out to Adam Betts for supplying the artwork and icon for this (except the Photo Booth button I ripped-off from Apple). And also Austin Sarner for bearing with my inane Cocoa questions.

You can download SantaSnaps here.

download SantaSnaps

For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, the sources are available here. Bear in mind that this was really quickly thrown together so if you're into half-assed, uncommented code, you'll love this.

My charity of choice for the Cocoa Duel competition is the Humane Society which promotes protection of all animals. It's a charity that I frequently support and I hope you'd check them out and consider making a donation to them. And please also consider the other entrant's charities.

Please donate to the Humane Society charity and help spread the word by digging SantaSnaps if you like it.

Update: I fixed the bug with saving a snapshot and uploaded a new version.

Posted by John Casasanta

1489 Responses to “My Entry: SantaSnaps”

  1. Love it! A SantaSnapsPhotoCard hybrid would be cool...
    Posted by Jon Nathan on December 21st, 2006 at 07:42 AM
  2. Lol, I was wondering if you'd end up submitting something. Pretty spiffy. You're lucky you got Adam to work on your entry!
    Posted by Ernest Liu on December 21st, 2006 at 07:59 AM
  3. I love this app.
    Posted by Schlaeps on December 21st, 2006 at 09:07 AM
  4. Hmmm. Doesn't work on my MacBook Pro core 2 duo. The generated tiff files have an invalid tiff header according to Safari.
    Posted by Rich on December 22nd, 2006 at 02:07 AM
  5. Rich: I'm looking at John's code and it appears that it's actually saving it as a PDF with a TIFF extension. Try changing the saved images' extensions to "pdf" instead of "tiff" and see if Safari or Preview will load them. (Preview can downsample PDFs to more traditional image formats, if needed.)
    Posted by Jonathan Grynspan on December 22nd, 2006 at 02:43 AM
  6. The TIFF/PDF problem was just me trying to fix the snapshot bug before uploading the original version...it wouldn't have worked even with Jonathan's suggestion. Anyway, I just fixed the bug and it now saves as PNG. I also improved it so that it now grabs the snapshot right after you press the snapshot button instead of doing it right before saving. Thanks for the feedback everyone and I'm really glad you're finding it to be a fun little app!
    Posted by John Casasanta on December 22nd, 2006 at 06:36 AM
  7. Dear Mac Developer, It has come to my attention that one or more of your Mac applications may be Universal. A Universal application runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Mac computers and is compatible with Mac OS X v10.4.4 or later. We are currently featuring Universal applications in Apple's Macintosh Products Guide (http://guide.apple.com). I would like to include all of your Universal products, however we are unable to confirm that they are in fact Universal. In order to include your product in the Universal application section of the Mac Products Guide, your website needs to clearly indicate that your products are Universal. Please consider licensing the Mac OS X Universal logo, free of charge, and placing it on your website. You can download the logo and license agreement here: http://developer.apple.com/softwarelicensing/agreements/maclogo.html Please let me know when your website has been updated so we can include your product. You can submit or update your product listings at http://guide.apple.com/submit/ . Thanks! Dan Reed Macintosh Products Guide Developer Marketing Apple Computer, Inc.
    Posted by Dan Reed on December 22nd, 2006 at 07:36 PM
  8. Great app! Definitely helped me get in the holiday spirit! I'm really glad you fixed the bug! Great job!
    Posted by jack henry on December 23rd, 2006 at 10:02 AM
  9. Very nice and funny. You can find my pic here: http://www.admartinator.de/2006/12/23/frohe-weihnachten-2/ Have a merry Christmas!
    Posted by Martin on December 23rd, 2006 at 12:14 PM
  10. SantaSnaps has been added to http://www.linuxlinks.com/
    Posted by Steve on December 23rd, 2006 at 08:46 PM
  11. Great idea to send to my grandsons but when I save the picture my face is right side up but the Santa overlays are up side down. Using 10.4.6 on a 2.1 PPC G-5. I’ll gladly donate to your charity. It’s a good one.
    Posted by Ted Fronefield on December 24th, 2006 at 03:32 AM
  12. GREAT! :)
    Posted by mr.ape on December 24th, 2006 at 12:13 PM
  13. Superbe idée ! On pourrait même imaginer de l'étendre à plein de personnages fantastiques comme les lutins, les fées, des extra-terrestres etc... Il y a là un créneau à exploiter formidable ! Mille bravos ! Superb idea! One could even imagine to extend it to full fantastic characters like the imps, the fairies, of the extraterrestrial etc... There is a crenel to exploit formidable! Thousand cheers!
    Posted by Eric Melot on December 24th, 2006 at 03:32 PM
  14. Great work - as a fellow coder, your work is quite nice on this project. Also I commend you on your charity of choice, most people go with human relief aid and personally I think that animal charity groups are ignored or unmentioned when it comes to charities - just a thanks for giving some badly needed attention to Animal charities - what's better then the humane society is the local ASPCA (unlike the humane society, they have a policy where they don't put any animals down). Seasons Greetings!
    Posted by Online TV Joe on December 24th, 2006 at 07:09 PM
  15. GO SHARKS! =D (like the jersey.)
    Posted by chris on December 24th, 2006 at 07:31 PM
  16. Great work! I love it, and so did my wife. Check out my blog for a shot of our masterpiece with our baby Hana. :-)
    Posted by umijin on December 25th, 2006 at 12:54 AM
  17. Hmmm, nifty app., but like T. F., on my MacBook ( w/ 10.4.8 ) I, and the background, are right-side-up, but the Santa effects are upside down. Disconcerting to say the least.
    Posted by shadesOgray on December 25th, 2006 at 05:42 AM
  18. took some photos with it and added them to flickr with the keyword/tag "santasnaps".. thanks! :)
    Posted by sarah on December 25th, 2006 at 06:54 AM
  19. Hope you won't mind this, but after having great fun with your program as you intended it, I decided to look under the hood. Replacing some of the overlay png files with my own has been pretty entertaining. Thanks for the cool program.
    Posted by Adam on December 27th, 2006 at 02:22 PM
  20. We had a 007 themed party for new years eve, and in an insane rush, I managed to also hack the PNG list and had my wife and I come up with new ones appropriate for our party. It was a big hit, so thank you very much. :) http://somejunkwelike.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=42400
    Posted by steve on January 4th, 2007 at 05:20 PM
  21. I've posted a how-to for hacking this app to use your own graphics. http://www.somejunkwelike.com/wordpress/2007/01/04/hacking-santa-snaps/
    Posted by steve on January 4th, 2007 at 09:28 PM