Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images

phrase.it

225 pointschezmo95 comments

It's sad that people call their little/fun projects useless. I just used your project and thought it was awesome. And even the worst project ever is useful for you. It's how you learn, build and explore. Plus, some truly great things have started out as "useless."

Awesome and useful are orthogonal. I found it awesome too, but I have no use for it.

I wouldn't say that they are necessarily orthogonal, in fact, I would say that most of the time they align pretty well.

In what is usually described as a sweet spot or what Steve would call good design.

Thanks for the kind words!

Exactly this.

If the op learned anything at all from this project I would argue that it is in fact far from useless.

Great job on setting a goal and creating something, op!

    All art is quite useless
        - Oscar Wilde

Perhaps "pointless" or "aimless" might be better than useless, but a useless item can be a item which exists merely to delight the mind/spirit. Of course, internet pedants and other cutting edge point-missers would likely argue that this is in fact itself a use. Such is the way of things.

Maybe "intrinsically motivated" would be a more HN compatible term.

Sadly, it's often a good idea to preface "Show HN" submissions with this nowadays so that someone else doesn't tell you how useless your project is in the comments thread.

It's the analogous of Reddit comments starting with "I know this will be downvoted but..."

Sort of, except that this is usually considered as down vote baiting on HN and is frowned upon. From HN's guidelines: "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."[0]. In this case though, I don't feel it was OP's intention to invite down votes.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Some useless weekend projects are worth big money!

There was a company called bubbleshare built around this feature a few years back. It was acquired by a company called Kaboose for ~$2 mil, and then Kaboose was acquired a few years later by Disney. (http://venturebeatprofiles.com/company/profile/bubbleshare)

Cool promising project! i dont see why you can't make it as big as pinterest ( or at least a fraction of it)

Remove the TOS and the checkbox during post, make the process easier. At home screen immediately bring a top list of funny pictures with speech balloons. Add facebook/twitter and pinterest integration (if possible), to share your photo with friends. Create a bookmarklet a la pinterest to allow easy sharing of images from any web site. Create a snapchat like mobile app for photo taking and phrasing with a speech bubble and sharing with friends. give me and 20 funny friends of yours accounts to get traction quicker. Make a grand plan, and speak around about it; "cartoonize the web". Add `Laughed' or lol buttons. You have 2 ways going forward 1) a mobile app like instagram or snapchat 2) a web site like pinterest.

edit: beauty is social with pinterest, curiosity with hn/reddit++ but humor is not yet web-full-scale social. phrase.it can be that.

Yes, I think it has potential.

It could also be nice to be able to directly embed the image in forums, so have a direct link to the image (might also be useful for reddit ?).

I know that then, it makes it a bit harder to exatract money, but adding a "created with phrase.it" at the bottom should help with that.

>> Add cartoon style speech bubbles to photos within minutes

I think you are underselling here... I don't think you'd be lying if you said "in seconds". I can't imagine any quicker way of doing this.

Also, I like how you can drag an image directly onto the page and it uploads. You may want to add some visual queues for that (like imgur).

Good job!

I concur. It took me maybe 10-20 seconds, because it's very intuitive to use and I don't have to upload to give it a try. Plus, the site has no loading issues, which is rarer than it should be.

Do the suggested improvements, especially the social integration, and it might go viral. Good job!

It can fetch images that may not be safe for work. I had to immediately close the window. Will check out in the evening after work.

Yep, same here. Will try again later.

same here as well. It did find a random image that was not safe for work. Please do add a warning somewhere above.

removed the NSFW image. Sorry for that!

This loaded a fairly NSFW random image when I tried it. Sort of uncool.

For me too. Twice.

It could be a niche market worth to explore.. :)

I just removed the NSFW image as i can not edit the title any more. Sorry for that! Did not think that far when posting.

There are safe places to get random images for testing, like placekitten, perhaps others have more recommendations. Personally, I didn't get an unsafe image and found your site easy to use and effective.

Both flickr and google image search can be made to return only CC-licensed SFW images.

No worries. And I like the site, by the way.

Simple and nice. I would suggest adding a third option to take a photo from webcam.

Either webcam or from Instagram/Facebook/Flickr, like Picplum does.

Yes, pull an image from my Facebook, let me add a bubble, post it back as a new image.

Why don't you create a facebook app for this? It could be quite viral if you give it a shot...

You could even pull your user's pics (or their friends'?). I'd use that...

i actually thought about this but wanted to keep it simple in the beginning. i reconsider it right now.

I agree, this isn't useless. I know my mom used to buy stick-on thought bubbles to put on pictures of her kids in baby books and such. If she wanted to do that now she's have to insert a photo into PowerPoint and add a thought bubble. I would use Photoshop which arguably would take even more time.

My suggestion for improvement: have it auto-upload to imgur or another image sharing site (maybe add a checkbox for that when people are reviewing the TOS).

Very nice, and quite a bit of fun.

My only objection is with the TOS: while I can sort of understand defamatory and libelous (even these rule out most of the fun), I have issues with "inaccurate". Does not leave much wiggle room, does it?

http://i.imgur.com/Sq8Kd.jpg

This is simple enough to catch on with the tweeny Facebook crowd. Make is more SOCIAL NETWORK and with luck it may go viral.

You should add the ability to modify an existing phrase'd picture. That would make it easier for trends to emerge.

Or clone to start your own based on a current one.

When people say "weekend project" on HN, is it implied that it's multiple weekends worth of effort, or just one?

To be honest it was more like a long Christmas weekend.

Looks amazing! Nice work.

I'd recommend changing "Take a random photo" to "Use a random photo". The take action for photo is generally understood to be different to the one you are using it for.

Love how it works, possibly a new way to create memes...

Your app didn't really like my vertically oriented screen, but otherwise it's really neat, the random picture button is really genius (lets us use the software quickly). I hate to be "that guy" but... maybe using rounded buttons for the "preview and save" would be better? It seems to fit the aesthetic

I've tried it 10 times, and have only been given two different images to work with. I suggest-

A: more images B: a faster, more intuitive way to skip an image, rather than forcing the user to "cancel" and then start a new caption.

Good point about the cancel button! Once i find more pictures i can put to the stock i'll definitively add a "next image" button.

Really nice domain name too! So many sites have .it, .io, etc domain names where the TLD doesn't mean anything at all and it's glaringly obvious it's just cause they couldn't get the .com. In this case it works very nicely.

Thank you. I think this is useful project for me. The other day, I also thought about making a algorithm to create a speech bubble around a piece of text. You have a pretty good implementation.

looks really cool, well done! Only thing I would recommend is to immediately popup the share icon as soon as it's done rendering. The heart icon also isn't clear how I share the image.

Very cool, I like it and definitely don't find it useless because it's a nice product. I made one: http://phrase.it/show/wMQYy

This is pretty awesome. A friend of mine wanted me to look into doing something exactly like this. And this is definitely not useless. Great job!

If anyone’s looking for something like this but more flexible, the $30 desktop app Comic Life (http://comiclife.com/) also lets you add speech bubbles to images, as well as arrange the images in panels and write sound effects. Comic Life was bundled free with new Macs a few years ago, so you might already own it.

Really nice! I think it might be good though, if the UI controls for speech bubble style could be on the other side, away from the "business end" of the (default) speech bubble. Usually those controls will be covering the face or mouth or... sound utterance mechanism of whatever you're making talk.

Really nice and fun though!

I think reddit would go crazy for this sort of stuff. In fact, have it load images from imgur. Also, nice work.

Good work. What did you use to build it?

On the client mostly jQueryUI, qq-upload and some little jQuery plugins. On the server my usual PHP setup (Smarty, phpThumb) and the awesome instagraph library for the filters (https://github.com/webarto/instagraph)

Turn this into a Facebook app that lets you make comics and it could be big.

Also, add some more fonts ;)

Nice. Reminds me of my Bubble Project concept from a couple of years ago. http://valentinlaube.de/projects/bubble%20project/

Edit: check out the interactive prototype on the bottom of the page

I'm reminded of the... I don't know if it's a quote or a general idea, but the sentiment that the next big thing starts out looking like a toy.

Possible UI bug though - I can't seem to control the line spacing to fit the text in the bubble?

One suggestion: A quick check, if Cancel is really what the user wanted or, if the site gets reloaded or the user leaves it by accidentally hitting a bookmark display a notification, that he/she might want to save first.

This is awesome great work, please do a follow up post on how you built it :).

I think this could actually have utility in a business setting: many folks doing presentations, newsletters, etc... don't have image software (or the know-how) to create this kind of effect.

You could add an option to select a photo from one of my existing albums on Facebook, make changes on top of it and then upload it back to Facebook as a new image.

Nice application btw.

Before clicking, I thought as though it would be like http://mustachify.me/ with a prompt/variable to render the bubble text.

This reminds me of this website: https://makr.io/

I think I found it on HN a few months ago.

Fun little project anyway :)

I hope "weekend project" is just a thing people say these days and this really took longer than a weekend, or I wish I could create something this awesome in a few days :/

This is extremely well done and has a lot of potential. A lot of people talked about incorporating it with Facebook and other mediums (maybe an app).

Do it up!

Very cool and lots of business potential. My nephew loves to 'make' comics. I can see parents uploading their kids drawing and adding speech bubbles.

Ha! This is fun though I was hoping for some simple machine-vision based pre-processing on the image to auto place the speech bubbles.

Very nice! I'll echo thoughts of some one else here who said you'd be representing it right if you added "in seconds" to your tagline.

Useless? No way! Just a clever title! ;) Nice work, bookmarked! You should create more useless projects IMO! Or better this one!

Cool! I found it difficult to place the call-out in the right position because a smaller version is showed while dragging.

Unfortunately, I can't add Japanese character for this. It seems that this application don't have CJKV fonts.

This is awesome! So far from useless, I'd like to see the most recent or most popular on the home page though

actually its quite usefull project. Do you know. we can use this for campaign like we love Iran. http://www.weloveiran.org/

can you share the techonology stack or how its built. is it open sourced ?

Looks awesome ! I was using befunky, and ps previously, but this one s gonna be my new fav

Make this into an iPhone app and you'll probably get some very nice monthly dosh from it.

http://phrase.it/show/gYTbo

@chezmo I'd love to see a write up on the technology stack used for this project!

The site only has one default Photo of the dude pondering in his cube?

I couldn't find a way to change bubble type after dragging it in.

Just wondering how you render the final image?

i transfer all parameters via json to php and redo the rendering on the server with the GD library.

Pretty cool. How did you implement filters?

instagraph library (https://github.com/webarto/instagraph)

This shit is pretty awesome. Good stuff.

This is fun and works nicely.

This is great. Kudos.

simple idea, beautifully made, love it!

Looks great!

i like it :)

Note: Not useless

Very neat!

"take a random photo" might be NSFW

facebook would love this

where is the gallery?

for god's sake .. add a nsfw tag for the auto generated pics ... not cool man

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