Colorwaver

An app to detect colorwaves (swatches/palettes) in the real world - powered by VisionCamera and Reanimated.

I wrote this app in less than a day, a speed simply not matched by native app development. Because it's written in React Native (TypeScript/JavaScript), it runs both on iOS and Android, but performance critical parts (e.g. the image processing algorithm or the animations) are backed by native Objective-C/Swift/Java code.

See this Tweet for more information.

Try it!

Download the repository and run the following commands to try Colorwaver for yourself:

iOS

yarn try-ios

Android

yarn try-android

Project structure

This is a bare React Native project, created with create-react-native-app.

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• 📁 src: Contains the actual TypeScript + React (-Native) front-end for the Colorwaver App.

  • 📄 src/getColorPalette.ts: Exposes the native iOS/Android frame processor plugin as a JS function with TypeScript types. This function has to be called from a frame processor. ('worklet')

  • 📄 src/Router.tsx: The main component that gets registered by index.js. This acts as a main navigator, navigating either to the Splash Page (Permissions) or the App Page (Main App) depending on whether the user has granted permissions or not.

  • 📄 src/Splash.tsx: The first Splash page to ask the user for Camera permission.

  • 📄 src/App.tsx: Contains the actual source code for the App's front-end.

    • VisionCamera is used to get a Camera device and display a Camera component. Also, a frame processor (a function that gets called for every frame the camera "sees") gets attached, which calls the native iOS/Android frame processor plugin.
    • Reanimated is used to smoothly animate between color changes.

    Because VisionCamera also uses the Worklet API, the entire process between receiving a camera frame and actually displaying the palette's colors does not use the React-JS Thread at all. The frame processing runs on a separate Thread from VisionCamera, which then dispatches the animations on the Reanimated UI Thread. This is why the App runs as smooth as a native iOS or Android app.

  • 📄 src/useAnimatedColor.ts: A helper function to animate color changes with SharedValues.

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• 📁 ios: Contains the basic skeleton for a React Native iOS app, plus the native getColorPalette(...) Frame Processor Plugin.

  • 📄 ios/PaletteFrameProcessorPlugin.m: Declares the Swift frame processor plugin "getColorPalette(...)".

  • 📄 ios/PaletteFrameProcessorPlugin.swift: Contains the actual Swift code for the native iOS frame processor plugin "getColorPalette(...)".

    This uses the CoreImage API to convert the CMSampleBuffer to a UIImage, and then uses the UIImageColors library to build the color palette.

    VisionCamera's frame processor API is used to expose this function as a frame processor plugin.

  • 📄 ios/Colorwaver-Bridging-Header.h: A Bridging Header to import Objective-C headers into Swift.

  • 📄 ios/Podfile: Adds the UIImageColors library.

  • 📄 ios/UIColor+hexString.swift: An extension for UIColor to convert UIColor instances to strings. This is required because React Native handles colors as strings.

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• 📁 android: Contains the basic skeleton for a React Native Android app, plus the native getColorPalette(...) Frame Processor Plugin.

  • 📄 android/app/build.gradle: The gradle build file for the Android project. The following third-party dependencies are installed:

    • androidx.camera: camera-core
    • androidx.palette: palette

  • 📁 android/app/src/main/java/com/colorwaver/utils: Contains two files copied from android/camera-samples to convert ImageProxy instances to Bitmaps. (YuvToRgbConverter.kt)

  • 📁 android/app/src/main/java/com/colorwaver: Contains the actual Java source code of the Project.

  • 📄 android/app/src/main/java/com/colorwaver/MainApplication.java: Sets up react-native-reanimated.

  • 📄 android/app/src/main/java/com/colorwaver/MainActivity.java: Installs the PaletteFrameProcessorPlugin frame processor plugin inside of the onCreate method.

  • 📄 android/app/src/main/java/com/colorwaver/PaletteFrameProcessorPlugin.java: Contains the actual Java code for the native Android frame processor plugin "getColorPalette(...)".

    This uses the YuvToRgbConverter to convert the ImageProxy to a Bitmap, and then passes that to the Palette API from AndroidX to build the color palette.

    VisionCamera's frame processor API is used to expose this function as a frame processor plugin.

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• 📄 babel.config.js: Adds the native frame processor plugin getColorPalette (called __getColorPalette) to Reanimated's global list.

Credits

• @Simek for the original idea
• react-native-reanimated for allowing JS code to be dispatched to another Runtime (Worklets)
• react-native-vision-camera for allowing you to run JS code on a realtime feed of Camera Frames (Frame Processors)
• The Palette API from AndroidX for getting the Color Palette on Android
• UIImageColors for getting the Color Palette on iOS
• You guys, for downloading, giving 5 stars, and pushing Colorwaver up in the Charts.