Wednesday, May 9, 2012

purikura smartphone apps




 I CONCUR, MR. PANDA
After having prepaid T-Mobile brickphones since 2004, I've finally acquired a sumafo smartphone, a LG Revolution 4G LTE ! I have officially entered the 21st century thanks to my Mr. Bun He added me to his family plan when my ol' prepaid melted a couple of weeks ago, and since then it's been glued to my palm as I try to seek out new apps to play with...






Snapeee 
(Android)

Snapeee by Japanese company MindPalette Co., Ltd., is available for iPhone, iTouch, iPad, and Android in Japanese, English, and Chinese, and knocks it out of the park with its free selection of  accessories for making authentic looking purikura-- it has a generous and well-designed selection of stickers, sparkles, moustaches, the silliest and baubliest of the baubles, you name it. This app is great for making birthday cards and the like, messing around with photos of your friends or just embellishing blog photos or profile pictures in general.
I had trouble figuring out how to save my finished photos at first; there's no easy-to-find save button. You have to upload your photos to your Snapee "Timeline," a social feed which you can make public or private, and from your timeline you can tap your photos and email them to yourself. Using the timeline feature, you can also view other Snapeee users' purikura and rate or comment!
Unfortunately, the app seems to be unstable and continually crashes, which gets really irritating after a while. I also wish preset photo filters and a pen/paint tool were available to draw silly things on my photos, and that stickers were moveable once you place them on the photo.


 Sample Snapeee Purikura:

SO HANDSOME. I KNOW.
The translucent butterfly is the best friend I was referring to.


Mr. Bun was none too enthused, despite the dancing bear! cake.
Sleepy sleepy face...
There are some setbacks, unfortunately, that make Snapeee frustrating to use at times. The app crashes often for any number of reasons. The developers update often in an attempt to fix existing bugs, but what frequently ends up happening is more instability, the "fixed" version of the app crashing again and again just upon opening it up. I've had the most trouble when it comes to selecting photos to edit (I often have to choose the photo I want 2-3 times to get the editor to open) and downloading new stamps and borders.



PhotoWonder 
(Android)

The "beautify" filters available on PW are what drew me to this Chinese app (recently acquired by Baidu) initially. The "better skin" function is a favorite when I'm having a bad face day, and there's also a slimming function, eye enlarger, anti-acne, whiten, blusher, and anti-red eye. The photo filters include Instagram-like HDR toning effects, color exclusion, and some other neat sparkly options that are worth a look (like snowy and time travel scenes!) You can also make collages with multiple photos using a variety of different frames and backgrounds. I haven't explored the social networking/sharing aspect of this app so much yet.
The selection of frames and stickers are very lacking and even a bit boring compared to Snapeee's, unfortunately. But saving is as easy as pie, and after editing in PW I can pop them into Snapeee for a couple finishing touches.
If only there was one app to rule them all -- one that would synthesize the filter and decorative features and prevent me from having to double-up edit my phone's photos on PW and then Snapeee, ahaha.


PhotoWonder filter effects
top, l to r: SCpurple, stars, aging
bottom l to r: heaven, snow, LOMO



& a sample collage, for good measure!!!!!


Hours of fun... no, seriously, I can't stop messing around with these now, OK (breathes)

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