I got my hands on another iPhone application to help me waste away a long Labor Day weekend. It’s called Fun Booth and it’s from a company called Spoonjuice. The idea is that it’s like a fun photo booth where you can add props to your photo like those funny glasses with a mustache and bushy eye brows.
What I liked
Well, there’s the obvious time wasting fun to be had. It’s another thing you can load up when you’re with a bunch of friends and want to take turns laughing at yourselves and each other. It’s pretty amusing by yourself, too, but I think it’s better for group fun. There’s a bunch of different props to choose from and you can resize them as needed to fit the subject’s face. I uploaded a bunch of my Fun Booth photos to my Flickr account here.
I also liked the integration with Twitter and Flickr. Sure, I could save the photo and use another app to upload it, but this just saves me a step. The image to the right is one that I simply uploaded to Flickr right from the Fun Booth app. I sent the same image to Twitter as a test, too. If you’re not interested in either of those, you can also email the image to yourself or someone else or save it as a contact. They covered several bases in regards to the ability to share your creations.
What I didn’t like
Unfortunately, I found some things that I think could use some improvement, as well. While it’s good to have the Twitter, Flickr, email and contacts integration, they forgot one key option, and that is the ability to just save your photo unless you want to create a new one. This means that if I had to search through the hundreds of photos in my album or worse, line up and take the perfect head shot, I have to do that again every time I want to save a photo. Another thing I thought was missing was the ability to select a specific prop. The app has a button to randomize the prop, but not a list to select one, so if you want to get to a specific prop, you have to keep randomizing until it comes up.
Conclusions
I do have a couple gripes that make the app a little less easy to use. I would also like to see the ability to add more than one prop at the same time. Currently, you can accomplish this by saving the photo and using it as your next photo, though. The bottom line is the price. There’s a lot of junk apps in the app store for $0.99 but this isn’t one of them. At the 99 cent price, this is a unique application that is worth its price tag if you get even just an hour of fun out of it, though I hope to see at least a prop selection list in the next update.
Yes, indeed, there IS an “app for that”. In this case, “that” means creating a virtual bobble head of yourself or others with your iPhone. It’s called iLoveMe, but don’t let the name fool you. It’s all about having fun.
What does this thing do?
It does just what I mentioned above. It creates a bobble head like interactive animation using the images you provide. Once you have all the images in, you just shake it around and laugh at yourself (or, in my case, the Robosapien).
How does it work?
It’s pretty simple. To create your bobble head, just take three to nine photos. You should have one with your head pretty straight and then two or three (each side) of your head tilted to varying degrees. The more photos you take, the smoother it will be. Take a look at the video of my example below.
Conclusions
I’ll be honest. Having already known that John is a really smart guy, I figured it would be a cool app, so I was already a little biased. After playing with it, though, I really like it. Of course, it’s only $0.99, too, so that helps. The interface is pretty basic, which doesn’t look the best, but simple is good. Besides, the important part is how it works, and that part was perfect. This will be a great app to pull out with friends and make bobble heads of them. The only thing it really needs now is the ability to save multiple image sets.
Want it for free?
The first five people to tweet about this post (use the short URL http://lnk.gd/ft) will get a copy for free to play with just because I think you’ll have fun with it.
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How much easier can we make it? So you can sneak in with just one entry by simply posting a comment here, you can increase your odds by reading and commenting on a few more posts here and at one of the blogs below and maybe subscribe to a couple, or you can really up the odds and subscribe to all all of our blogs (which you’ll enjoy reading anyway), comment on a bunch of posts, and blog about this contest. The more entries you earn, the better your odds, of course. If you’re going to post about this contest, just grab the image and code from here.
The deadline for this contest is 12:00 AM June 1, 2008.
I also liked the integration with Twitter and Flickr. Sure, I could save the photo and use another app to upload it, but this just saves me a step. The image to the right is one that I simply uploaded to Flickr right from the Fun Booth app. I sent the same image to Twitter as a test, too. If you’re not interested in either of those, you can also email the image to yourself or someone else or save it as a contact. They covered several bases in regards to the ability to share your creations.
