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Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images
- sushantsharma 14y agoIt can fetch images that may not be safe for work. I had to immediately close the window. Will check out in the evening after work.
- alfg 14y agoYep, same here. Will try again later.
- mind_heist 14y agosame here as well. It did find a random image that was not safe for work. Please do add a warning somewhere above.
- chezmo 14y agoremoved the NSFW image. Sorry for that!
- corkill 14y agoThis is awesome great work, please do a follow up post on how you built it :).
- Gobitron 14y agoThis is fun and works nicely.
- robbiea 14y agolooks 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.
- bpfh 14y agoVery nice, and quite a bit of fun. 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?
- bharad 14y agoGood work. What did you use to build it?
- chezmo 14y agoOn 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 https://github.com/webarto/instagraph)
- julien_c 14y agoPretty cool. How did you implement filters?
- chezmo 14y agoinstagraph library (https://github.com/webarto/instagraph https://github.com/webarto/instagraph)
- dfgonzalez 14y agoWhy don't you create a facebook app for this? It could be quite viral if you give it a shot...
- arscan 14y ago>> Add cartoon style speech bubbles to photos within minutes I think you are underselling here... I don't think you'd be lying if you said "in seconds". I can't imagine any quicker way of doing this. Also, I like how you can drag an image directly onto the page and it uploads. You may want to add some visual queues for that (like imgur). Good job!
- kaybe 14y agoI 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!
- kurtvarner 14y agoIt'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."
- StavrosK 14y agoAwesome and useful are orthogonal. I found it awesome too, but I have no use for it.
- soccerniru 14y agoI wouldn't say that they are necessarily orthogonal, in fact, I would say that most of the time they align pretty well.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sadlyNess 14y agoIn what is usually described as a sweet spot or what Steve would call good design.
- olalonde 14y agoSadly, 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.
- diminish 14y agoCool 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.
- Gmo 14y agoYes, I think it has potential. It could also be nice to be able to directly embed the image in forums, so have a direct link to the image (might also be useful for reddit ?). I know that then, it makes it a bit harder to exatract money, but adding a "created with phrase.it" at the bottom should help with that.
- fastball 14y agoI've tried it 10 times, and have only been given two different images to work with. I suggest- A: more images B: a faster, more intuitive way to skip an image, rather than forcing the user to "cancel" and then start a new caption.
- chezmo 14y agoGood point about the cancel button! Once i find more pictures i can put to the stock i'll definitively add a "next image" button.
- kevincennis 14y agoThis loaded a fairly NSFW random image when I tried it. Sort of uncool.
- IceyEC 14y agoFor me too. Twice.
- Ecio78 14y agoIt could be a niche market worth to explore.. :)
- chezmo 14y agoI just removed the NSFW image as i can not edit the title any more. Sorry for that! Did not think that far when posting.
- marquis 14y agoThere 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.
- JonnieCache 14y agoBoth flickr and google image search can be made to return only CC-licensed SFW images.
- kevincennis 14y agoNo worries. And I like the site, by the way.
- akhilrex 14y agoi like it :) Note: Not useless
- gokulk 14y agofor god's sake .. add a nsfw tag for the auto generated pics ... not cool man
- cotsog 14y agoThis is great. Kudos.
- orangethirty 14y agoI think reddit would go crazy for this sort of stuff. In fact, have it load images from imgur. Also, nice work.
- nvr219 14y agoI 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).
- mijustin 14y agoI 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.
- bryanjos 14y agoThis is pretty awesome. A friend of mine wanted me to look into doing something exactly like this. And this is definitely not useless. Great job!
- jaequery 14y agofacebook would love this
- therandomguy 14y agohttp://i.imgur.com/Sq8Kd.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Sq8Kd.jpg
- stewie2 14y agoThank 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.
- ya3r 14y agoSimple and nice. I would suggest adding a third option to take a photo from webcam.
- MasterScrat 14y agoEither webcam or from Instagram/Facebook/Flickr, like Picplum does.
- jaxn 14y agoYes, pull an image from my Facebook, let me add a bubble, post it back as a new image.
- zoidb 14y agoI 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 :/
- irfan 14y ago"take a random photo" might be NSFW
- marknutter 14y agoWhen people say "weekend project" on HN, is it implied that it's multiple weekends worth of effort, or just one?
- chezmo 14y agoTo be honest it was more like a long Christmas weekend.
- zapt02 14y agoVery neat!
- joren 14y agosimple idea, beautifully made, love it!
- mavci 14y agowhere is the gallery?
- KMBredt 14y agoOne 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.
- sergiotapia 14y agoThis is simple enough to catch on with the tweeny Facebook crowd. Make is more SOCIAL NETWORK and with luck it may go viral.
- MasterScrat 14y agoYou should add the ability to modify an existing phrase'd picture. That would make it easier for trends to emerge.
- dimitry 14y agoOr clone to start your own based on a current one.
- thedangler 14y agoJust wondering how you render the final image?
- chezmo 14y agoi transfer all parameters via json to php and redo the rendering on the server with the GD library.
- kitcar 14y agoSome 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 http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/bubbleshare)
- kaliblack 14y agoLooks amazing! Nice work. 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.
- Suan 14y agoReally 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.
- username3 14y agoI couldn't find a way to change bubble type after dragging it in.
- jasdeepsingh 14y agoVery nice! I'll echo thoughts of some one else here who said you'd be representing it right if you added "in seconds" to your tagline.
- swlkr 14y agoThis is awesome! So far from useless, I'd like to see the most recent or most popular on the home page though
- hashtree 14y agoBefore clicking, I thought as though it would be like http://mustachify.me/ http://mustachify.me/ with a prompt/variable to render the bubble text.
- drewmck 14y agoMake this into an iPhone app and you'll probably get some very nice monthly dosh from it.
- jarnix 14y agoThis reminds me of this website: https://makr.io/ https://makr.io/ I think I found it on HN a few months ago. Fun little project anyway :)
- kenkam 14y agoLove how it works, possibly a new way to create memes...
- switch007 14y agoCool! I found it difficult to place the call-out in the right position because a smaller version is showed while dragging.
- suyash 14y agoThe site only has one default Photo of the dude pondering in his cube?
- phraseit 14y agoIsn't this a $7 CodeCanyon Project? - http://codecanyon.net/item/make-your-images-interactive-tag-your-images/2707794 http://codecanyon.net/item/make-your-images-interactive-tag-...
- rgonzalez 14y agoThis shit is pretty awesome. Good stuff.
- tsurantino 14y agoThis is extremely well done and has a lot of potential. A lot of people talked about incorporating it with Facebook and other mediums (maybe an app). Do it up!
- mung 14y agoI'm reminded of the... I don't know if it's a quote or a general idea, but the sentiment that the next big thing starts out looking like a toy. Possible UI bug though - I can't seem to control the line spacing to fit the text in the bubble?
- jneal 14y agoVery cool, I like it and definitely don't find it useless because it's a nice product. I made one: http://phrase.it/show/wMQYy http://phrase.it/show/wMQYy
- vlaube 14y agoNice. Reminds me of my Bubble Project concept from a couple of years ago. http://valentinlaube.de/projects/bubble%20project/ http://valentinlaube.de/projects/bubble%20project/ Edit: check out the interactive prototype on the bottom of the page
- theblogdoctor 14y agoYou shipped code! That alone disqualifies your project from being deemed "useless". Rock on!
- BklynJay 14y agoLooks great!
- qxf2 14y agoVery cool and lots of business potential. My nephew loves to 'make' comics. I can see parents uploading their kids drawing and adding speech bubbles.
- treskot 14y agoUseless? No way! Just a clever title! ;) Nice work, bookmarked! You should create more useless projects IMO! Or better this one!
- rtpg 14y agoYour 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
- instakill 14y agoTurn this into a Facebook app that lets you make comics and it could be big. Also, add some more fonts ;)
- arunabh 14y agoLooks awesome ! I was using befunky, and ps previously, but this one s gonna be my new fav
- bluethunder 14y agohttp://phrase.it/show/gYTbo http://phrase.it/show/gYTbo
- sandeepeecs 14y agoactually its quite usefull project. Do you know. we can use this for campaign like we love Iran. http://www.weloveiran.org/ http://www.weloveiran.org/ can you share the techonology stack or how its built. is it open sourced ?
- Pezmc 14y ago@chezmo I'd love to see a write up on the technology stack used for this project!
- alagappanr 14y agoYou 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. Nice application btw.
- damon_c 14y agoReally 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. Really nice and fun though!
- roryokane 14y agoIf anyone’s looking for something like this but more flexible, the $30 desktop app Comic Life (http://comiclife.com/ 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.
- Inetgate 14y agoUnfortunately, I can't add Japanese character for this. It seems that this application don't have CJKV fonts.
- basheertome 14y agoHa! This is fun though I was hoping for some simple machine-vision based pre-processing on the image to auto place the speech bubbles.