This morning one of several new iPhone apps that caught my eye was iLOL – a free app for generating funny pictures and LOLcat type images, and sharing them. If any of you are getting an impression that I’m a heck of a good slacker when given half a chance, you’re absolutely right – but anyway, I can definitely go for having some fun with pictures and silly captions on the iPhone, so I gave iLOL a try.
In fact, I’ve ended up trying out two free apps and one 99 center in the ‘creating LOLcats’ category today. Each has its limitations, one was a big disappointment, and one easily became my current favorite …
Here’s some quick thoughts from my not at all slacker-like messing about with LOLcat creation apps today:
iLOL:
This one was the disappointing one for me. It’s a free app, which is great – but it forces you to save / share your creations *exlusively* via its web site. As in, you cannot choose to save them to your Camera Roll / Photo Library, and you cannot choose to email them to a recipient you choose (you can only choose to spam all the friends you choose to invite to iLOL). And you have to register and provide an email address on their site.
Once I discovered these iLOL strong-arm tactics, I deleted the app, so have nothing more to say about it.
FAIL Maker:
This one is much more promising, and is also free. As with all these apps, you start by choosing an image from your Camera Roll or Photo Library (or take a new one to use), to apply your captions to. FAIL Maker’s interface is very nice to work with – as it lets you simply tap anywhere within your pic to bring up its palette, which lets you add caption words to your pic. When the palette is up, you can just drag your desired word around the image to place it exactly where you want. This seems a clever way to do this, and also offers the most flexibility amongst these apps in terms of where you can place your text.
Once you’re happy with your creation, you choose to Save it (or discard if you’re not happy) and it gets placed in your Camera Roll.
My only gripe with FAIL Maker is that it does not allow you to come up with your own wording for captions – you have to use its default set, which is: FAIL, PWND, WIN, WRONG, EPIC, and an exclamation point or question mark.
These are great for pics that fit one of these terms well – and for many occasions they might be all you need – but it would be nice to be able to create your own wording as well.
LOLcatMaker:
As you’ve likely guessed by now, this is my current favorite. It is not free, but it’s in the popular $0.99 price bracket. As with FAIL Maker, you can choose to snap a new picture or use an existing pic as the basis of your LOLcat-ing brilliance – and your efforts are saved to the Camera Roll when you’ve completed them.
You have slightly less flexibility on the placement of your caption text – with the choices being to add wording at the top of the image, or the bottom, or both.
What makes this my current favorite is that you can write anything you like as your caption, which of course allowed me to create the comedic masterpiece included at the top of this post 🙂
So there you have it – an MLK Day Slackertastic rundown of a couple good choices (and one that doesn’t work for me, but might for you) for LOLcat and photo captioning creations on the iPhone …
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TAGS: iphone apps
