iPhone App Review: Lifestrips by Pamela Flora

I have a lot of two kinds of apps on my iPhone: photo apps and games. And now I've found a photo app that is darn close to being as fun as any of the games I have loaded: Lifestrips, by Vivid Apps, priced at $2.99 in the US App Store.

From the developer's website, the description for Lifestrips is as follows:

With Lifestrips you can create your own personal comic strip. Add your own photos, apply simple image filters to increase their impact, and add speech balloons and text-boxes. When you are done, save the resulting image to the iPhone's photo album and email it to friends and family.

Lifestrips uses the same state-of-the-art visual engine that was pioneered in Lifecards. It allows you to freely zoom and pan the strip while you edit it. You can insert, move, scale, and rotate photos from you photo-album, and you can also insert texts and select font, color, size, and alignment.

Overview and Impressions:

To get started with Lifestrips, select the option to create a new comic and then choose a template. There are forty-some template layouts, from which you can choose two, three, or four panels for your comic. Once you've selected your layout, you simply touch each panel to add a photograph from your camera roll.

Within each panel, you can pinch, zoom, and rotate your photo with gestures to make each picture fit the panel the way you want it to look. Additionally, you can pan and zoom the whole strip itself to make it easier to manipulate the elements of your comic.

Once you have all your panel pictures in place, the real fun starts. I typically add my text bubbles next. Lifestrips offers a number of different text bubbles, thought bubbles, and callouts for the text of your comic. Each bubble is resizable with drag handles at each corner. The pointer at the end of the bubble that indicates who is speaking is repositionable with a drag handle, too. There are several font face options, and you can change the font size, color, and the background color of the bubble. There is an option for adding a drop shadow to your bubble or callout, and an option to change the border color. Text alignment within the bubble is also changeable.

Occasionally, I had trouble grabbing a text bubble when I was trying to resize or move it, and instead grabbed the photo in the panel. This is a function of the limited screen space of the iPhone, and not a problem with the app. And as I mentioned above, the developers, trying to accommodate the problem of fine work on a very small screen, have built in a pan and zoom option so that you can get in closer on your comic and manipulate the elements with more finesse.

I do want to note that if you rotate your phone, the app turns to landscape mode, which may afford you some extra room to work if you're finding the small screen a little difficult to work with.

Once I have my text in place, I dabble a bit more with the photos in my comic panels. I generally zoom and resize and move my photos around in the panel before I add my text balloons. I do it with gestures, but Lifestrips offers on-screen fine-tuning options so that you can move your picture left, right, up, or down, reduce the size, increase the size, or rotate it by degrees either clockwise or counterclockwise. There is also an on-screen option to replace the panel photo with another photo, though that is easily done simply by double-tapping the photo in the panel that you'd like to change.

What I like to do with the photos in my comic panels after I've added the text bubbles is to play around with the filters Lifestrips offers. In the filters panel, you can change your photos to grayscale, invert the colors, ramp up the contrast, sharpen the photo, change it to sepia, make it look like a sketch, make it look like a comic, make it halftone, and more. None of these filters is particularly refined, but they're certainly good enough for a comic-making application. You can layer filters, and each filter comes with a slider to give you control over the strength of the effect, as well as a “remove” button to let you easily remove a filter.

Finally, if you desire, you can add a border to each panel of your comic. While the rest of the options available in Lifestrips offer a bounty of choices, the border options are surprisingly slim. There are only four border choices, and you have no control over the color of the border. I'm hopeful that the developers will make more border options available in future updates.

It should be noted that each element of your comic – each panel, each photograph, each text bubble – is controlled and manipulated separately. Changing the filter on one photograph will only alter that photo, not the others. Changing the background color of a text bubble will only affect that one text bubble, not any other text bubbles. On the one hand, that affords you a greater range of artistic options in your comic. On the other hand, if you decide to change everything up after you've worked on it, you'll have to change each element – there is no universal change option that I can find. But tweaking elements is easy and reasonably intuitive, and in what will be, at most, a four-panel comic, making each change independent of the others doesn't take much time or effort.

Once you have your comic all ready, you can choose to save it, email it, or upload it to the web. Lifestrips has an auto save feature in case you're interrupted by a phone call while you're working on your comic; it also offers the option to save a comic within the app so that you can work on it later. You can, of course, save to your camera roll. Comics are saved at a maximum resolution of 620x800.

I sent my husband an email of my very first web comic; it was easy to send, he received it instantly, and it was easily viewable for him. I was also able to send a comic to my Twitter account (Lifestrips uses Twitpic) and uploaded one to my flickr account. There is an option to send your comic to your Facebook account, but I had problems with that – when I connected to Facebook through Lifestrips, I got hung up in the Facebook window within Lifestrips. I never did manage to get a comic uploaded to Facebook. I checked out the developer's message boards, and apparently there are some Facebook issues going on with Lifestrips' sister app, Lifecards, and the developers are working on a solution. Presumably they'll fix the issue with Lifestrips, too.

Other stuff

I was fiddling around with a two-panel comic I'd created, including filters and other formatting, and I went to the templates page. I was pleasantly surprised to note that you can change the template of an existing comic without losing the formatting and effects you've already applied. I selected a three-panel template, and it ported in the two panels I'd already completed, so I had but to add a third panel photo and format it like the others. That's a really nice bonus.

This is not an app you'll spend thirty seconds on to get a finished product. I spent probably ten or fifteen minutes on each of my comics, playing around with the various options. For the first comic, there was a bit of a learning curve as to what button to push when (some of the menu options are nested, and some are contextual), but by the time I started my second comic, I was zipping around in the app with ease.

The UI is not beautiful, and it isn't the most streamlined UI I've ever used, but it's intuitive enough and it gets the job done. Frankly, I found the hardest part of making a comic using Lifestrips to be thinking up what to put in the text balloons.

What I like:

1. Tons of options, so you can really customize your comic.
2. Easy to work with. Despite the slightly clunky interface, manipulating the various elements to create a solid comic with minimal fuss is really easy. Kudos to the developers for packing in so many options in a fairly complex flow of possible operations and still making it easy for the end-user!
3. Lots of options to share your masterpieces.
4. You can put down the app and work on a comic later, whether you're interrupted by a phone call or just want to save the rest of the work for later.
5. Creating a decent finished product, while not a thirty-second process, doesn't take very long at all.
6. The results are really cool-looking, even if I can't think of anything witty to say in my comics. (Lifestrips can't help my lack of imagination, alas.)
7. Lifestrips is really quite a lot of fun to play with. I literally had as much fun creating my comics as I do playing some of the game apps I have on my phone.

What I don't like:

1. Although I don't love the UI, I don't know what could be done, really, to make it more sleek. It works, though, so I'm not going to complain too loudly about it.
2. The Facebook share option needs to be fixed.
3. There is no 3. I love Lifestrips!

Conclusion

Lifestrips is worth every penny it costs, and then some. I would pay a couple more bucks for Lifestrips. It's stable, it's easy, it's fun, and for all that I couldn't come up with anything witty for my comic text, I love the look of my comics. Someone with a better imagination than I apparently have could really do fabulous things with this app. I rate it a solid five stars out of five.

AppStore Link: Lifestrips - Price £1.79/$2.99

Comments

[SCW]

@Pamela I agree
One great app

I highly suggest trying LifeCards for it is very similar & has a million more frame/borders to entertain you. That is one of the main differences.

Great review... I too love LifeStrips