Strip Designer
Developer: Vivid Apps
Description:
Impress your friends with your own personal comic strips, created on your iPad, iPhone or iPod using just the photos from your photo album or iPhone camera.
Select one of the many included page templates. Insert photos into the cells. Add a couple of balloons with fun words. Add additional effect symbols (stickers) like “Boom”, “Splash”, or “Bang” to spice up the story. When you are happy with your new graphic novel, share it with friends and family.
Photos can be added from the camera, your photo-album, or downloaded directly from your Facebook account. You can apply filters to photos, and change the layout of the page to fit your needs. You can even paint on the photos, or draw your own sketches from scratch.
Text balloons can be positioned, sized, and rotated freely on the page. You can alter colors, font, text-size. You can even give the balloons color gradients for additional impact.
There are plenty of stickers to spice up the action, but you can also create your own using photos from your photo-album and the built-in masking and drawing tools.
Use warped text with thick borders and gradient color-fill to give your cartoon the super-hero look.
Additional fonts can be installed from the web, so you will only be limited by your own imagination.
While you work, you can freely pan and zoom to control even the smallest details.
Once you have finished your masterpiece you can save it to your photo album, email it to your friends, upload it to Facebook or Flickr, or create a Tweet with Twitter and Twitpic
— All from within Strip Designer.
Features:
• More than a 100 strip templates with 1 to 9 photo cells
• Create your own layouts with up-to 12 photo cells
• 12 different balloon types
• Warped text
• Change ballon size, rotation, color, and transparency
• Use any iOS font or install additional fonts
• Color gradients
• More than 150 stickers to insert for additional impact
• Dropbox photo, fonts, and document download/upload support
• Publish on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter • Direct Facebook photo download
• Export to PDF to create real comic book pages
• Control scale, position and rotation of photos
• Paint on photos or your own stickers
• 5 different cell styles
• Image filters for photos
• Freely pan and zoom while you work
• Insert maps
Specifications:
Category: Photo & Video
Updated: 18 October 2012
Version: 1.0.1
Language: English, Dutch
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.
Age: 9+ infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
Review:
What I Liked About This App:
. While this app has been designed to allow you to develop your own comic strips from your photo album or hand drawings, I have found this incredibly useful for a range of different applications!
. It has “coolness” factor as you can add stickers and other embellishments. For older kids who might need some help in different areas of learning and communication, this app is age appropriate and doesn’t look like a typical ‘teaching tool’.
. You can add speech and thought bubbles.
. You can email the comic strip or photo board as a pdf – allowing it to be printed off.
. You can use the child’s real-life experiences to teach them new skills in a range of different ways.
. There are lots of options for photo layouts, including an option for a text box.
Things That I Found Tricky:
« I wanted to change the size and font type for headings in the text box – but it all needed to be the same.
« The ability to record voice with the pages – so the child can talk about the page or tell their story, and then hear it back.
How I’ve Used This App In Therapy:
– Retelling Past Experiences:
- The visual photos help prompt the child to talk about something that’s happened in the past.
- Because they’ve helped add speech bubbles, captions and embellishments, it gives them additional visual cues as to what to talk about.
- The speech bubbles can provide a visual / written prompt for the kids to get them started, or you could put in a question that they could ask someone else to prompt verbal to-and-fro conversation.
– Conversational Skills:
- The child is less reliant on the adult doing all of the talking / providing the scaffolding to find out what happened. The adult / peer might point out parts of the picture, and the child could respond by talking about that part of the picture. Comments as well as questions are then used within the verbal exchange.
- Thought bubbles can be used to show what a person might be thinking, but the speech bubble would have the socially appropriate words to say. This could highlight how some words might hurt another person’s feelings, so we choose different words to say to them.
- The thought bubbles / spoken word difference can also highlight when peers might be saying one thing but really meaning another – a fantastic way to teach perspective taking.
- Adding speech bubbles that ask a question – to encourage the child to ask their communication partner a question.
– Problem Solving:
- Thought bubbles might show the different options that a person is thinking or choosing between. The speech bubble highlights the best or most appropriate response to choose; or the choice that the child chose could be used and the consequences talked about.
– Grammar:
- You could right the correct grammatical sentences in the speech bubbles and use this as a visual reminder for the child to recall the correct form to use when talking. Eventually the words could be reduced so the visual prompting is decreased, e.g., “I saw a tiger at the zoo” – “I saw a tiger…” – “I saw…” and “…saw…”.
– Following Instructions:
- The instructions for different tasks / activities could be used here. Start with short simple instructions, and move to longer instructions containing two or three actions.
– Story-Telling:
- The child could use a series of photos to recall an event that has been experienced, but then change different elements to include fantasy / imaginative elements. Fantastic to help with adding structure to storytelling – page 1 is the “Introduction”, pages 2 & 3 are the “Events”, and page 4 is the “Ending”. You could also add “Problem” and “resolution of Problem” when the child is ready, or other elements such as “Feelings” and “Why” to prompt the child to include more complex elements to their stories.
– Facilitating Play Skills:
- Have photos of different items to include in the play as a visual prompt to expand play skills.
- Or, put photos of actions with objects in a sequence to prompt different play sequences.
- You can think print off the pages to create a book – the child can recall what they did within the play to someone else that may not have been there!
- A great way to capture moments where the child spontaneously does something new and different in the play and you want to reinforce these lovely new developments so they happen again next time.
– Making Simple but attractive Flyers / Ads – they can be saved into your images / photos and uploaded whenever needed.
I really enjoy using this app and have found many, many different ways to use it. It’s definitely one of my ‘must-haves’.
Review completed on 26.11.12, by Wendy from The Appy Ladies
Appy Chat
with Jens
I first thought about developing this app back in Early 2009, taking about 6wks to develop, as it was based on another app (Lifecards). Since then I have been developing and expanding the app ever since with updates almost once a month, with the next one in December.
There are quite a lot to this app, the “Grid layout” feature that allows you to create your own cell layouts easily, but I think the one I like the best is the ability to download and install external fonts.
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Giveaway:
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The Appy Ladies 