ANIMATIC BY INKBOARD

DRAW YOUR OWN GIFS Free with IAP | animatic.io

You may think creating your own hand-drawn looping GIF would require a fairly complicated tutorial-heavy app. Not so. Animatic by Inkboard throws you in the deep end with no tutorial — and, in truth, you don’t really need one. By trial and error alone, within five minutes, your humble reviewer had drawn a stretching cat GIF and shared it to the (unappreciative) TechLife office. The whole process is super simple, and the free version of the app gives you enough basic tools to whet your appetite. First things first, create a blank canvas and select which of the seven pen tools you’d like to use (varying in line angle, texture and thickness) and then hit the coloured dot on the bottom right to select your colour. Then get drawing! There’s a helpful undo/ redo ability and rubber for finer altering. You can pinch to zoom in and out, and dragging the image around is achieved by using two-finger sliding. Once you’ve drawn your first frame, you can start your second — and the ‘ghost’ image of the first frame comes with you so you have a handy guide as to where to start your second frame. The ghosts of the last three frames will be visible as you draw more and more frames. Once you’re done, you see a preview of your creation and are given the opportunity to change the speed at which it plays and what to do with it from then. All up, we thoroughly enjoyed using this app to create a bit of silliness. While it might not serve an overly ‘useful’ purpose, what’s the point of living without a little bit of fun, eh?