Enhance! (Also: Hi, I’m Not Dead)

Hi everyone, it’s tynick. Sorry I’ve been gone so long.

Long story short: I got pretty burned out during covid. I already spend all day doing tech stuff for work, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I lost the urge to come home and do more tech stuff for fun. So the blog went quiet, the half-finished projects piled up (as they do), and I kind of just checked out for a while.

But the itch came back. And recently I took one of my old web apps and turned it into a real iOS app, which felt like as good an excuse as any to finally dust off the blog and actually write something.

The app is called Enhance. And yeah, it’s exactly the meme you’re thinking of.

You already know the bit

You’ve seen this scene a hundred times.

A detective leans over a grainy security camera still, points at a blurry blob in the corner, and says the magic word.

“Enhance.”

The computer beeps. Four visible pixels magically rearrange themselves into a crystal-clear reflection of the suspect’s face in a doorknob. Case closed. Everybody claps.

I’ve wanted to do that my entire life. So I did. Well, the fun half of it.

Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way

Before any of you smart internet people email me: no, it cannot pull detail out of pixels that don’t exist. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this has ever worked.

If you’re a detective who found this post hoping to crack a case with 4 pixels and my free app, let me save you some time. Sit down. Take a breath. Stop believing CSI. You cannot read a license plate reflected in a bird’s eye from half a mile away. Nobody can. I’m sorry you had to hear it from me.

What Enhance fakes does is the fun part.

So what does it actually do?

Open it up, hit Take/Select Photo, and pick a picture. Pinch and drag until the thing you care about is front and center. Hit Enhance. That’s the whole app. A second later you have a GIF that slowly zooms right into the spot you picked.

There is also a Choppy zoom checkbox if you want that stuttery, frame by frame, “the computer is working really hard on this” look instead of a smooth zoom. You already know the exact look I mean.

Here’s a real one I took while working on this post.

So why did I make this?

Anyone who has ever watched a crime or investigation show knows the bit. They zoom way into some grainy photo and magically create pixels out of nowhere to make it look perfect. Enhance is based on that. It’s the joke, turned into an app.

And yeah, cranking out a dumb “ENHANCE” meme GIF is fun on its own.

The part I didn’t expect: my wife and I actually use it. All the time. A slow zoom into the exact thing you’re talking about is a really good way to point someone at a detail. “No, look at THIS,” without making them go hunting for it. We both find it easier than the Markup tool built into iOS, and it’s easier to see. The zoom does the pointing for you.

So somewhere along the way my dumb meme app turned into something actually useful. Not bad for a backend guy who argues with YAML for a living and had no business writing an iOS app.

I don’t want your photos

Okay, here’s the part I’m actually proud of.

Enhance does everything on your phone. Your photo never leaves your device. Not to me, not to a server, not to anyone. There are:

• No accounts
• No analytics
• No ads
• No servers
• No “we value your privacy” banner quietly lying to you

I didn’t add tracking because I genuinely do not want your data. I can barely keep track of my own camera roll. The app takes the one photo you hand it, makes your GIF right there on the device, and that’s the entire relationship.

When most apps say they’re “private,” they mean they only sold most of your data. Enhance means it literally. It’s the whole reason I built it the way I did.

Get Enhance

It’s on the App Store, it’s free, and there’s no catch. No subscription, no “pro tier” that unlocks the zoom button you already have.

👉 Download Enhance

If you search the App Store instead, look for the one that isn’t trying to sell you a monthly plan to zoom into a photo. That one’s mine.

Let me know what you think

It is almost certainly not perfect. If you hit a bug or you’ve got an idea to make it better, email me at tyson@tynick.com. I actually read them.

And if you make something funny with it, send it my way on Twitter. If you want to help fund the next stupid idea, buy the in app purchase.

Now go enhance something.