The idea behind Kinotopic is to capture those little moving moments with Harry Potter-esque animated photos.
Wait – animated photos? I mean animated gifs, right? Well, yes and no.
There are dozens of animated gifs apps on the iOS App Store (my favorite is GIFvid2), but Kinotopic does things differently. Rather than animating your entire image, it lets you select a specific area for animation, leaving everything else motionless.
With a bit of care and perhaps some practice, you can create animated images that evoke a mood – like this one or this one. Others don’t work quite as well. It’s about capturing a small detail of movement in an otherwise quiet scene. Here’s my first effort.
The resulting pictures – or kinos, as the app’s maker calls them – look pretty good on your iPhone screen. (They don’t look so good at full size in a web browser, where you can see a fair bit of pixellation.) With some care and trial-and-error, it’s possible to make some interesting images.
When I first encountered Kinotopic last week, it was still closely tied to Facebook. You could only create new kinos if you connected the app to your Facebook account. The good news is that this unfortunate restriction has been removed in a recent update. Here’s what developer Radu Spineanu said when we asked about it:
It was a misjudgment on my part. I thought people don’t want to enter their email and password and prefer to just click to create an account. But I’ve received a number of emails and they are all related to the Facebook integration. The new version allows people to sign up manually.
If you fancy trying your hand at making some Kinotopic artwork, you can grab it for two dollars on the iOS App Store.
[xrr rating=70%]
