Knock knock! It’s a cool new photo sharing mobile app

At the Buzzworthy event in San Francisco, I got a hands-on demo of the recently released Knocking, an iPhone application from Pointy Heads Software. The app combines one-to-one communications with photo sharing in a way that will let you easily and quickly share huge numbers of photos with a friend.

How does it work?

The name of the app is central to it’s entire theme. The idea of “Knocking” is that before you send the photos, you check if your friend is free to get them. And you do this very easily, by knocking on their phone - like you’d knock on someones door.

Let’s start from the receivers end. You have the Knocking app installed on your phone: it doesn’t have to be up front and running all the time, it operates in the background. If a friend of yours “knocks” on your phone, your device will quite literally make a knocking noise like someone rapping on wood. At that point you can choose whether to accept the knock or ignore it. If you ignore, your friend gets a little message on their screen saying sorry, but you’re not available right now. At the demo I got last night, the person being sent the pics was in class in New York, so they refused the knock.

If you accept the knock, then you get access to an album on your friends phone - you get to scroll through their photo album in real time. Any picture you want to keep, you simply click the “save” button and it comes straight down to your device. And an album can have up to 100 pictures in it!

Now, let’s have a look at how it works if you’re the one sending the pics. The Knocking app accesses the core pic functions of your device. So you can look at a picture album you’ve already created using the native camera app on your phone. Then you simply select which pics you want to send by tapping them. You can see a few of them are ticked in the pic below:

Then you hit “knock”. After a little while you’ll see whether your friend has accepted or not. Then, as they scroll through the album, you see which pics they’re look at! This feature is included to make it feel like you and your friend are flipping through a photo album together.

What we think?

This is an intuitive, easy-to-use photo sharing app. More impressive, though was the second app that was demonstrated for me. But unfortunately I can’t talk about that one yet! It hasn’t quite made it through the Apple approving process yet.