Folioscope
Eat your frozen heart out, Disney
Free Developer 1Button, 1button.co/folioscope Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8.0 or later
From the minds behind App Store best-selling puzzle game Quetzalcoatl, in which you trace snakey shapes with your finger, comes Folioscope. Unlike its predecessor, though, Folioscope is not a game – it’s a pocket-sized animation studio.
If you’re an animation wizard who requires billions of buttons to press and all the artistic range of Photoshop, you might find Folioscope a bit lacking. However, it does offer a surprising range of tools, such as onion-skin layers that let you trace over your last frame, and various pen sizes and styles that give you an impressive range of looks to work with.
You can’t make the next Studio Ghibli film, but that’s not in the spirit of Folioscope anyway. On an iPad, with a stylus or Apple Pencil, you can make detailed shorts, though they may be limited to primary and secondary colors. On iPhone, you’re stuck with whatever your finger can create. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes art is inspired by creative restrictions.
You can save your creations as a GIF file, which is wonderful, because then you can easily throw them on Twitter, Facebook, a blog, or just send in an iMessage. Folioscope may be limited, but it opens up a difficult art form to people who might want to learn, and that’s just brilliant.
Our only slight niggle is that there’s no way to banish the ads with a one-off In-App Purchase, which would be a useful option, especially for heavy users.
the bottom line. Whether you want a bit of fun or you’re genuinely very good at art, Folioscope is great to have at your fingertips. Kate Gray