iPhone App Reviews

iToony

Michael (Admin) | Aug 18, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (7 votes, average: 4.43 out of 5)

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I love making people look like total jackasses. A couple weeks ago I bought an iPhone application called Pictems because I was hoping it would help me do that but, alas, it did not. Dressing people up as pirates just isn’t my thing. I think what I really wanted was something more like iToony where, instead of Pictems’ costumes, you get thought and speech bubbles and some basic drawing tools.

iToony lets you snap a new photo or select an existing one, and then you get to draw over the pic or put your own bubbles and captions wherever you want. After you’re done setting up your text and drawing mustaches on everyone, you can even post your jacked-up photos directly to a Flickr or Picasa account without leaving the application! Just set up your account once and your future uploads will be incredibly easy. In fact, just about everything is easy and pretty intuitive – iToony really makes it simple to publicly embarass the people closest to you in the shortest amount of time possible.

Once you start playing around with the tools and options you should be able to pick up iToony pretty quickly. A note about drawing: don’t forget you can UNDO and REVERT! I forgot this and started to get pissed every time I made a drawing mistake which was a lot because, let’s face it, finger-drawing on the iPhone isn’t easy no matter what app you’re using. Undo is done by swiping two fingers across the screen (something I’ll complain about later) and Revert to Original can be found in the trash can icon at bottom-middle of the screen.

Overall I think iToony is awesome and I can really see myself using this on a semi-regular basis, but as I was messing with my pics I did come up with a few improvements that I would love to see in future updates…

• More alignment options. iToony gives you enough speech and thought bubbles that positioning them in a logical way will usually be possible, but occasionally you’ll run into situations where the person’s head is near the edge of the photo or too close to someone else’s speech bubble… and this is when you start wishing you could position the “bubble connector” (what points to the subject’s head) separately from the bubble itself.
• Font and bubble size options. Right now, all bubbles and speech are one-size-fits-all. It would be so nice to be able to insert some large bold text as well as smaller text… not only would this be more expressive, but it would probably help you fit more bubbles into the picture if you want them.
• Text centering. This would be especially useful for captions.
• Bubble shape editing. When you have several bubbles in one pic, they really start to get in each other’s way. If you could control the height or width of the bubbles it would go a long way toward extending the number of ways you can goof on people.

And as for my only gripe about iToony’s finger gestures: swiping two fingers to undo was frustrating because half the time I’d wind up drawing another line! It gets easier with practice, but I prefer the idea of shaking or tilting as an undo action. Drawing a circle to make a bubble and a line to make a caption works great and I wouldn’t change a thing there (unless it’s in the name of upgrading the functionality).

Crash-wise, it did crash on me here and there… not enough to call it a problem… but I was very happy to see that iToony saves your work in progress. Very classy.

Bottom line is that Standard Widget Corporation has made a very clean and useful app. iToony does enough things well that I believe it’s worth $2.99 right now, and if they can manage to fit in some of the upgrades I mentioned above it’ll just be that much better.

Tags: $2.99, photo editing