Review: Deliciously Evil App Grants Endless Possibilities To Piss People Off
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD4s0CjwJqQ]
And now for something completely different.
I’ll admit, the first alarming thought that shot through my head when I stumbled across this vidclip on YouTube of Cult jefe Leander Kahney, was that he’d created it as fun-yet-terror-inducing way of emphasizing the “dead” part of the word “deadline” to Cult staff.
Turns out it was actually created by app developer Toga Pit — btw, cute marketing there, guys — to promote their new, maniacal-laughter-inducing iTouchMyFriends app, which turns images of your friends into manipulatable puppets. Just the evilness of the name ran shivers of anticipatory pleasure down my spine as I secured a copy to explore. I wasn’t disappointed.
What the app does is let you cull your friends’ figures from your photos, then turns them into puppets (or just crop their heads and pop them onto ready-made bodies), then animate them over a variety of backdrops. And iTMF provides a very slick and ridiculously bewildering array of mischief-making tools: add supplied sound effects or create your own, add props and special effects or go the instant-gratification route and use one of the ready-made scenarios. When you’re done, upload the villainy to YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.
All for a buck! I challenge anyone to find as much entertainment for a dollar.
By now you’ve no doubt noticed the app is mysteriously absent from the App Store — that’s because the app is still pending review by Apple’s notoriously perilous review board; Toga Pit says the app will hopefully appear at the App Store sometime this week. In the meantime, the app has a webpage to check out, and there’re a bunch of other uploaded, searchable iTouchMyFriends clips up on YouTube.
Verdict: 5/5
When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path — which explains why he's Cult of Mac's test editor-at-large. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of 
