iPhone: How to take a picture programmatically without buttons or displaying extra views?

Question

This question or similar has been asked before but from the responses I saw none answered the questions sufficiently. I'll describe what I'm trying to do and I'm basically looking to see if it is possible, and if so, a suggested approach would be much-appreciated.

I'd like to take a picture from the iPhone that is triggered with a gesture (e.g. a tap or swipe) and not a button press (via takePicture?). I'm aware of the ability to capture the contents of the screen and save that, but the resolution is much lower than that acquired through the actual camera. Following the taking of a picture I don't want any views to appear (like the image picker).

So in summery, a user would experience the following sequence of events: They are presented with a live camera view, they swipe their finger (a picture is taken) and the screen immediately returns to the live view. I've been able to accomplish this using the UIImagePickerController and UIGetScreenImage, but like I specified earlier, I'd like to acquire an image of the highest resolution possible.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you target for the AppStore, no you can't do that. Anything lower level than -[UIImagePickerController takePicture] depends on the private PhotoLibrary.framework, or even worse, IOKit.framework, so the best bet would be -takePicture.

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If you want to use undocumented methods, try the AVCapture class in Celestial.framework (http://ericasadun.com/iPhoneDocs300/_a_v_capture_8h-source.html).