The Big Day

From "guests can shoot" to a complete, branded, live product — in one very long day.

This was the day it stopped being a prototype and became a product — with a face, a voice, and a front door.

The marathon. In one very long day, Rheveal went from "guests can shoot" to a complete, branded, live product.

Morning — the host's half of the app

• Event creation, host login via a magic email link (no passwords), and a printable QR code for the tables.
• A live feed of photos rolling in during the event.
• Curation: after the party, the host approves, hides, and reorders shots before anyone sees them.
• The public gallery — the big reveal: a clean grid everyone can browse and save from.

Midday — reliability + polish

• Deployed the app to the web for real.
• Squashed the iPhone burst bug for good (the "stuck developing" gremlin from Day 2) — with a smarter way of storing photos and an auto-recovery for when the phone's browser gets wedged.
• Taught the app to handle iPhone ProRAW photos gracefully.
• Added a dark mode for the host tools.

Afternoon — a brand, and going live

• Wrote a real brand brief: "Film Nerd" — darkroom ink, safelight gold, a film-camera soul.
• Moved the app onto its real home: rheveal.app.
• Built the release email — the "the photos are in" note guests get when the gallery's ready — plus a one-tap unsubscribe (respecting people's inboxes from day one).
• First full end-to-end test passed: create an event → shoot → close → release → the real email arrives → the gallery opens → unsubscribe works. "Works end to end!"

Evening — the glow-up

• Recreated all 22 screens of the app in a design workspace to see the whole thing at once, then designed a full Film Nerd visual identity — colors, type, a proper button system — and applied it across the entire app.
• A round of experience upgrades: a real bug fix (guests could still shoot after an event closed — now they're sent to the "film's at the lab" screen and can confirm their email for the gallery), a recover tab so hosts can un-hide photos during a live event, little "Saved ✓" confirmations, and multi-select to save a whole set of gallery photos at once.
• A hardening pass — the safety and robustness work before real strangers use it (a cap so nobody can flood an event, file-type checks, graceful handling of hiccups). With that, version 1 is feature-complete.
• Split the marketing site from the app: the homepage rheveal.app now shows the marketing site; the app moved to app.rheveal.app — a behind-the-scenes domain-and-hosting dance.