Show HN: An app to quickly turn boring screenshots into beautiful images | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An app to quickly turn boring screenshots into beautiful images

pika.style

It's so apparent that all the comments here are from your friends (maybe even upvotes to push it to frontpage). This sort of behavior is starting to get more common on Show HNs recently but is really not welcomed. Please keep it clean!

Hola hackers! I’m Rishi(https://twitter.com/thelifeofrishi) and I’ve been building Pika(https://pika.style), a screenshot beautifier app to quickly generate images for marketing, blog posts, social sharing and more.

Pika is a result of me spending too much time in designing screenshots in Figma, choosing the gradients, shadows, backgrounds etc. I thought I could quicken this process through a simple app.

With Pika, you can:

- add background gradient/images to your screenshot

- add browser frame/wrapper

- add rounded corners

- add overlay text

- add custom watermark

- control padding

How is Pika fast:

Whenever you change the settings, Pika saves those settings locally on your device. So when you come back again, Pika already has your last set of preferred settings and you won’t need to tweak much. On top of that, Pika has shortcuts: Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste image to canvas, Ctrl/Cmd+S to save output image and Ctrl/Cmd+C to copy output image. With these shortcuts and pre-saved settings, you can literally generate a beautiful screenshot in just 4 keystrokes.

Pika is absolutely free to use and requires no signup. There’s a Pro plan for those who want to customise screenshots even more. Pika is also an open-source app, code can be found here(https://github.com/rishimohan/pika).

Some stats:

- Pika has generated over 15000 screenshots in last month

- Pika already has $90 MRR and have been receiving lots of feature requests

- On Github, Pika has over 200 stars and 40 forks

Let me know what you think of Pika :)

Looks great, thanks for offering a free tier as well as making that part open-source. I couldn't find license for the code on GitHub, would suggest to add one.

Also, perhaps add some prefix/suffix/icon like `$` for the pro-features on the app.

Thanks for the suggestions, I've updated the repo with paid features and license :)

https://twitter.com/thelifeofrishi/status/150145386705311334...

" Just submitted pika.style on HackerNews, if you have ever used this tiny app and found it useful then please help me with upvotes :)"

Guidelines: Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

I missed it, will keep it in mind. Thanks for sharing.

A couple of quick thoughts:

Its not really obvious to me what a "screenshot beautifier" _does_. It would be useful to have a (visual?) description of what it does without having to first drop a screenshot into it. I didn't have any screenshots to hand so fairly quickly clicked away.

Pasting an image using Ctrl-V doesn't work for me (Win 10, Firefox 97.0.1)

I think you're right. There needs to be an option to try the app with some demo image. I've noted and will add it :)

Before you write any more lines of code add a picture to your landing page showing what it does.

No one who isn't a personal friend of yours is going to burn time trying an image editing product without first seeing an example of what comes out of it.

It always boggles my mind when someone goes through all the effort required to build a product and then launches it via a landing page that has no screenshot and no explanation of what it does.

Anyone who visits your site is already busy and has a million other things to do and sites to visit. If you the deeply passionate creator of the app can't be bothered to take the time to show what your own product does, your visitors are not going to burn their own time trying to figure it out.

The site really should have examples. I'm not feeding my data into an app without first having an idea of the expected outcome. It's nice for repeat visitors that the homepage gets straight to business so maybe have a separate examples page linked to from the nav.

Also, link from the app to the git repo, not just the other direction.

Been using it for sometime, looks really good.

Thanks Fayaz :)

Well done, functional and easy to use!

Useful tool, thanks.

I use it mostly every day. Thanks for your work, Rishi.

Thanks Dmytro, and welcome to HN :)

What is this?. Some silly tool to add an image around your image. I can create this is one hour. Come on. This is shit , not hacker news worth. If this continues too much I am out of here.

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