Some blatant fanboism here, but what’s not to like?
- Child partition dancing
- High quality optics
- Fun camera app
- Outputs to animated gif, the only truly agnostic video format out there
Building something like this used to involve about 15 hours on the PC, a fast camera, a copy of Paint Shop Pro, and some serious patience and tolerance for folder sprawl.
Now I’m doing it on a phone in seconds, and I don’t even have to think about it. I can even do what were once difficult color modifications, holding the phone with one hand, and the dog’s leash with the other.
Of course, as a new dad, I’m a sucker for gimmicky pics, almost going out of my way to get them. Credit/blame to Google+ here; they sort of reintroduced the animated gif genre and burned probably thousands of compute hours just to try and impress me with Auto Awesome. Some have been gems, most have been duds. Thanks for the free compute G+!
In contrast, Nokkia’s Cinemagraph is hands-on. It’s not hard to use, but you have to visualize your shot, hold your phone steady, and frame the action. Then you press the screen and a few seconds later, you can introduce some neat & fun little effects.
And then you hit the save button, and the little Snapdragon inside gets busy and builds what you see above.
Gimmicky? Sure. But this is my gimmick, damnit, not a G+ cron job.
Final note: when are Facebook & Twitter going to man up and allow us to post animated gifs? I’m tired of having to use that other old yet fully agnostic communications protocol (SMTP) to share my cheesy dad pics with the fam.
Google lets me post these to G+ (if only someone were there to see them). My rinky-dink blog sitting on a shared LAMP server in some God-forsaken GoDaddy datacenter has no problem hosting these ineffecient but highly useful animated gifs.
Hell, I bet you can post animated gif shots to Yammer.
Yet Zuck & mighty Twitter can’t handle animated gifs. Sissies.
Wilson.tech 