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
