Cinemagram – The App
I rarely get very excited about an app these days. As an app developer I get ideas pitched to me on a daily basis, some good and some bad, but mostly the ideas have already been done before.
I am a big fan of photography apps, particularly Instagram and think it is awesome that anybody can now create professionally graded photos with an iPhone. I love the social interaction capabilities of these apps and can often spend hours trawling through friends timelines.
There seems to be a new Instagram clone or social photos style app every week and they all mirror the tried and tested filters & social feed model. Obviously, there will be only one winner in this field and Instagram seems to hold that spot very comfortably. The Instagram API now also allows for some of these other apps (such as Hipstamatic) to post to Instagrams feeds – a huge win for Instagram in my opinion if they are to become the de facto image aggregator. I wrote more about this as a reply to @joel_hughes blog post here (see comments).
This weekend I stumbled across a new take on this model. Cinemagram has the look and feel of one of these Instagram clones but the mechanics are very different. Shots are actually short bursts of video and the user can then ‘paint’ where they would like the movement to appear in the shot. Cool eh?
Technically, the app spits out a standard animated gif file which doesn’t look as bad as it sounds. Forget the flashy gifs of smiley faces that we used to see in the mid 90′s, theses shots look beautiful and the tools to create these shots are super easy to use. Gif frames are masked where the user ‘paints’ and I have seen some amazingly creative shots taken already. The example below shows a 2.5 second shot which compiled to a 58 frame 3.2mb gif file.
The app itself also looks beautiful, there are a few nips, tucks, and tweaks to the UI which could improve things but for a version 1 product, the bar is set very high. I have contacted the developers and am happy to hear that development is continuing and lots of new features will be bundled with future releases of the app. An API will also be released soon allowing lots of cool stuff to be done with social feeds and interaction. I wish the guys at Cinemagram every success as it’s not very often that an app comes around that genuinely excites me.
