The app I started with, finally finished

I'm Oleksandr Prudnikov, and Contour is the app I tried to build when I first started learning to program — years ago, and only now actually shipped.

Back then my first language was Swift. I was just getting into it, and around the same time I'd started doing sport. Pushups every morning. I wanted to see what would happen to my body if I kept it up — to track the small changes over a month or so by taking a photo of myself every few days.

The problem was I could never take the same photo twice. One day I'd stand a little closer to the mirror, the next a little further away, turned slightly differently. By eye it looked fine. So I'd open the camera, take the shot, open the gallery, flick back and forth between the new one and the old one — yeah, looks about right. Then I'd sit down at the computer, drop the two images side by side, one on the left and one on the right, and only then see that they didn't line up at all. Different distance, different angle, nothing I could actually compare. So I'd go and shoot it again. And again. It was basically impossible to do properly, and you needed a computer just to find out it hadn't worked.

I figured there should be an app that fixes this — something that shows you the old photo right on top of the camera so you can line the new one up before you press the shutter. That was going to be my first real project in Swift.

I never finished it. Not because of the code, but because of everything around it. I couldn't work out how to set up an Apple Developer account, or how you actually get an app onto the store. I was living in Ukraine at the time, and between the cost, the paperwork, and the long review process people kept complaining about, it all felt like too much for where I was. So I put Swift down and moved on. I went deep into backend and Python instead, which is still what I do day to day.

The idea never really left, though. And the thing that changed is that I don't have to fight all of that alone anymore. With Claude Code I could describe exactly the app I always wanted, have the Swift written for me, and finally get through the part that stopped me the first time — actually publishing it. To be honest about how it's made: I'm the one who decided what Contour should be and how it should work, and Claude Code wrote the code under that direction. That's the whole reason it exists today instead of staying an idea in my head.

So that's what Contour is. You load an old photo, it traces the edges and lays them over your live camera, and you move around until the lines snap back onto your subject. Then you take the shot from the same place as before. You can also just pick two photos you already have and slide between before and after — the exact thing I used to do clumsily on a computer — or stitch a series into a looping GIF to watch the change over time.

It's free. No account, no ads. I built it mostly to close the loop on the project I gave up on years ago and to finally put it in people's hands. If it turns out to be useful to anyone else, I'll keep adding to it — there's an AI mode I want to do next, where you drop yourself into a pose from a photo you saw somewhere. But for now it's just the simple version of the app I wish I'd had when I was counting pushups.

— Oleksandr