It's sad that people call their little/fun projects useless. I just used your project and thought it was awesome. And even the worst project ever is useful for you. It's how you learn, build and explore. Plus, some truly great things have started out as "useless."
Sadly, it's often a good idea to preface "Show HN" submissions with this nowadays so that someone else doesn't tell you how useless your project is in the comments thread.
Sort of, except that this is usually considered as down vote baiting on HN and is frowned upon. From HN's guidelines: "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."[0]. In this case though, I don't feel it was OP's intention to invite down votes.
Perhaps "pointless" or "aimless" might be better than useless, but a useless item can be a item which exists merely to delight the mind/spirit. Of course, internet pedants and other cutting edge point-missers would likely argue that this is in fact itself a use. Such is the way of things.
Maybe "intrinsically motivated" would be a more HN compatible term.
Some useless weekend projects are worth big money!
There was a company called bubbleshare built around this feature a few years back. It was acquired by a company called Kaboose for ~$2 mil, and then Kaboose was acquired a few years later by Disney. (http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/bubbleshare)
Cool promising project! i dont see why you can't make it as big as pinterest ( or at least a fraction of it)
Remove the TOS and the checkbox during post, make the process easier. At home screen immediately bring a top list of funny pictures with speech balloons. Add facebook/twitter and pinterest integration (if possible), to share your photo with friends. Create a bookmarklet a la pinterest to allow easy sharing of images from any web site. Create a snapchat like mobile app for photo taking and phrasing with a speech bubble and sharing with friends. give me and 20 funny friends of yours accounts to get traction quicker. Make a grand plan, and speak around about it; "cartoonize the web". Add `Laughed' or lol buttons. You have 2 ways going forward 1) a mobile app like instagram or snapchat 2) a web site like pinterest.
edit: beauty is social with pinterest, curiosity with hn/reddit++ but humor is not yet web-full-scale social. phrase.it can be that.
There are safe places to get random images for testing, like placekitten, perhaps others have more recommendations. Personally, I didn't get an unsafe image and found your site easy to use and effective.
I concur. It took me maybe 10-20 seconds, because it's very intuitive to use and I don't have to upload to give it a try. Plus, the site has no loading issues, which is rarer than it should be.
Do the suggested improvements, especially the social integration, and it might go viral. Good job!
I agree, this isn't useless. I know my mom used to buy stick-on thought bubbles to put on pictures of her kids in baby books and such. If she wanted to do that now she's have to insert a photo into PowerPoint and add a thought bubble. I would use Photoshop which arguably would take even more time.
My suggestion for improvement: have it auto-upload to imgur or another image sharing site (maybe add a checkbox for that when people are reviewing the TOS).
My only objection is with the TOS: while I can sort of understand defamatory and libelous (even these rule out most of the fun), I have issues with "inaccurate". Does not leave much wiggle room, does it?
I'd recommend changing "Take a random photo" to "Use a random photo". The take action for photo is generally understood to be different to the one you are using it for.
Your app didn't really like my vertically oriented screen, but otherwise it's really neat, the random picture button is really genius (lets us use the software quickly). I hate to be "that guy" but... maybe using rounded buttons for the "preview and save" would be better? It seems to fit the aesthetic
Really nice domain name too! So many sites have .it, .io, etc domain names where the TLD doesn't mean anything at all and it's glaringly obvious it's just cause they couldn't get the .com. In this case it works very nicely.
Thank you. I think this is useful project for me.
The other day, I also thought about making a algorithm to create a speech bubble around a piece of text. You have a pretty good implementation.
looks really cool, well done! Only thing I would recommend is to immediately popup the share icon as soon as it's done rendering. The heart icon also isn't clear how I share the image.
If anyone’s looking for something like this but more flexible, the $30 desktop app Comic Life (http://comiclife.com/) also lets you add speech bubbles to images, as well as arrange the images in panels and write sound effects. Comic Life was bundled free with new Macs a few years ago, so you might already own it.
Really nice! I think it might be good though, if the UI controls for speech bubble style could be on the other side, away from the "business end" of the (default) speech bubble. Usually those controls will be covering the face or mouth or... sound utterance mechanism of whatever you're making talk.
On the client mostly jQueryUI, qq-upload and some little jQuery plugins. On the server my usual PHP setup (Smarty, phpThumb) and the awesome instagraph library for the filters (https://github.com/webarto/instagraph)
One suggestion: A quick check, if Cancel is really what the user wanted or, if the site gets reloaded or the user leaves it by accidentally hitting a bookmark display a notification, that he/she might want to save first.
I think this could actually have utility in a business setting: many folks doing presentations, newsletters, etc... don't have image software (or the know-how) to create this kind of effect.
I hope "weekend project" is just a thing people say these days and this really took longer than a weekend, or I wish I could create something this awesome in a few days :/
You could add an option to select a photo from one of my existing albums on Facebook, make changes on top of it and then upload it back to Facebook as a new image.
