Instant Box
An inventory app for instant photography.
- Development
- Cursor, SwiftUI
- Deliverable
- iOS · Design & development
I shoot Polaroid, and I kept losing track of what was loaded where. So I built the app I needed.
The problem it solves
A Polaroid camera holds one film pack at a time, and a pack holds eight shots. If you own several cameras, you end up carrying several film types at once, and you have to remember which pack is in which camera and how many shots are left in each.
Instant Box keeps that inventory for you. You add your cameras and film packs, assign packs to cameras and log the date of each shoot. The app keeps count, so you don’t have to.
Working with AI, and where it stops
Instant Box started as an experiment in AI-assisted development and ended up on the App Store. Prototyping was much faster than it would have been without AI.
The AI didn’t make any design decisions. I designed every element, its position and its color in Figma first, then described it or showed it to the model, and often refined it by hand afterwards. The custom icons for each camera type and the color coding for each film stock came from that manual pass. They make the inventory readable at a glance instead of a list of names, and they give the app its personality.
Tested where it’s used
Because I built it for a real need, I tested it on actual shoots from the first build. That led to a few adjustments. It’s been in use ever since, and it’s on the App Store and still maintained.