App Review: Percolator, your pix brewed perfectly
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 10:00AM | Glyn Evans 
What is Percolator?
Percolator is a slightly unusual app that promises to transform any photo into a dazzling multicolor mosaic, add a dash of style to stale, old typography, or generate breathtaking patterns for website designs, page layouts or illustrations.
The app
Launch the app and either take or load a photo, and then watch as the app process the photo by "Serving...", "Grinding beans...", "Boiling water..." before finally "Percolating..." before displaying the final image (and yes the app really does say all this as it processes the image).
Touching the coffee cup icon which can be found at the bottom of the screen reveals the apps limited settings.
Tapping the heart icon allows you to save the resulting image, whilst tapping the + icon allows you to load a new image for editing.
So what do I think of Percolator?
This is without doubt a unusual and limited use app, which is very hard to rate, however if you want to create some bubbly looking images, then this app may be for you.
Above: My before and after Percolator photo
Reader Comments (4)
I purchased this app out of the gate being a big fan of Phototropadelic and have not been disappointed. I'd say that Percolator is, though quite polished and functional, still in its infancy. But that is a good thing. The developer has been extremely responsive to suggestions for future updates and is in process right now with a new GUI and added features. He has stated that future updates will allow PDF export, greater color control, possibly alternative shapes, etc. I've been very impressed with the current apps stability and style and look forward to the growth in the feature set. Kudos from me!
Okay, I had to bite on this one. Anything that creates unusual or funky effects gets a look (I'm also a fan of Phototropedelic.) This one is going to be lots of fun, I can already see that and I'll be looking for brightly colored images to try it out on. I like it so far that it's easy to use, doesn't crash on me (so far), saves at full rez and is just plain fun. It's a bit slow with the processing, but I can be patient when I want to be. Yep, I can see me using this to create interesting collages :D.
Hello & thanks for posting this! I am the app's author and wanted to pipe in with my 2¢ as well:
Yes, the feature set is 1.0: The app went from version 0.0 to 1.0 in a month, with the intention of putting the absolute-essentials in place first, then rolling out updates as needed. The app's 1.0 release has been very well received by users and that has been both encouraging & motivating.
The app uses very optimized C routines for the image processing which do *a lot* of number crunching. (There are three main steps, and that's why there is a pause between the "Grinding...", "Boiling..." and "Percolating..." steps.)
The app has not crashed on me yet, so far, either. ;)
Interesting application. Reminds me somehow of the cover of the Killers album Day and Age