The app is finally live worldwide. The first review went through relatively quickly — aside from one hiccup with IAP implementation and the terms of service, it was mostly smooth. Less than a week. But the excitement didn't last long.
I quickly realized the app wasn't available in Europe. Live everywhere in the world — except Europe. Since I'm from Slovakia, sitting right in the middle of it, that was a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
After some digging, I found the culprit: the DSA — Digital Services Act. A new EU regulation aimed at making digital services safer and more transparent. The idea itself is fine — verifying that a real person is behind an app and the services it offers makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the two-week verification window. For a solo indie developer waiting to see if their app lands, that's a long time to sit on your hands. But it went through. As of today, Filmari is available everywhere.
What I added while waiting
With two weeks of nail-biting ahead of me, I went back into the code. Here's what made it into 1.14.1.
Hyperfocal calculator
Hyperfocal distance calculations were already tucked inside the DoF calculator — but I started thinking it deserved its own standalone tool.
I deal with hyperfocal a lot when shooting with manual lenses. I'm a big fan of vintage glass, and hyperfocal distance is particularly useful in run-and-gun situations where you don't have time to pull focus shot by shot. The logic is simple: set focus to the hyperfocal distance, and everything from half that distance to infinity stays acceptably sharp. You stop thinking about focus and start thinking about the shot.
The hyperfocal calculator is now its own tool in the app. That said, I kept it inside the DoF calculator as well — when you're playing around with depth of field, having the hyperfocal number right there is genuinely handy.
Anamorphic desqueeze calculator
I also added a standalone tool for anamorphic desqueeze, branching it off from the Aspect Ratio Converter.
Here's the problem it solves: anamorphic lenses capture a squeezed image — typically 1.33x or 2x — that needs to be "unsqueezed" in post to get the correct widescreen aspect ratio. If you're not used to it, cutting with squeezed footage can throw off your spatial judgment entirely. You input the native frame width and the squeeze factor, and the tool gives you the correct desqueezed output dimensions.
Anamorphic squeeze factors are relatively standardized (1.33x, 1.5x, 2x being the most common), so the math is simple — but it's one of those things that's easy to get wrong when you're tired and switching between different lens systems on the same timeline.
On Set: rethinking takes
This one required some actual rethinking of the logic, not just a surface fix.
The original setup in the On Set view had three take states: bad, usable, and good. "Usable" was meant to signal "okay, but let's go again", while "good" was the take that wraps the scene. In practice, that distinction created more confusion than clarity.
I also had a swipe-left gesture that automatically marked a take as "good" and jumped the user to the next shot. Seemed efficient — until I remembered that most camera operators want at least 2–3 solid takes per shot before moving on. Jumping to the next shot after one "good" take was skipping a step that almost everyone actually needs.
So I reworked it. Now:
- Usable means exactly that — it's a take worth keeping, but you're not done yet.
- Good means you're satisfied and the shot is covered.
- Swiping left now checks whether you have at least one good take logged for that shot. If you do, it quietly marks the shot as done in the background.
In the Planner, you can now see at a glance which shots are covered and which still need work. In On Set, you can filter out done shots so you're only seeing what's left. It feels like the right flow — we'll see what the feedback says.
Design tweaks and bug fixes
Nothing dramatic here, just things that needed fixing.
I did a round of small visual adjustments across the app. More importantly, I fixed a bug with Reference Photos in projects. They were displaying correctly in the main project view, but after I added vertical scrolling for photo preview fine-tuning, it broke the photo display in the Home screen and the Project Hub. That's been sorted.
What's next
I'm slowly starting to think about how to get the word out — and honestly, marketing is not my natural habitat. I'm comfortable behind a camera and can talk about filmmaking for hours. Campaigns, funnels, content calendars — that's a different skill set entirely.
What matters to me is simple: does the app actually help with production? It's already helping me. But I'm a fairly specific type of person who handles a lot of things my own way, so I'm genuinely curious whether it'll click for others too.
Next up: Inventory. The gear management system is mostly figured out, but I think there's still room to make it smarter. More on that soon.
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