If you decided to try every new camera app that came down the pipe … well, you would fail. Miserably. There are so many camera apps released each day that you actually wouldn’t have time to test them all. By the time you gave even a cursory glance to each one released on a Monday it would be well into Tuesday and you would already be screwed because Tuesday’s big pile of camera apps would already be stacking up. Worse, the vast majority (and by vast majority I mean about 99.94%) of these things are either garbage, a rehash of something that has already been done to death, or (worse) both.
Honestly, your brain would probably explode about three hours in.
Ka-pow.
The sad upshot of this is that when a cool or interesting new camera app actually does come along it is easy to miss it completely. Such is the case with Nutshell, which is a very cool – if poorly documented in one crucial area – new app that lets you bridge the gap between photo sharing and full-on videos to make quick and fun “vignettes” about … well, anything. The app uses a cool sort of stepping-stone time-compression technique that focuses on three key images in your story and offers animated text and sticker-type graphics to enhance your narrative. Best of all, the price is definitely right: This is a fully-featured app with no ads and no in-app purchases and it is 100% free. Lifehacker people, take note.
However – and this is a big however in the world of consumer-level apps – there is a crucial omission in the “get started” instructions that almost guarantees your first attempt will be a big pile of shit. Free apps generally get one use before the user decides to keep it or toss it away, and your first use of Nutshell. The instructions tell you to “take three photos” … something that most people would think allows you to take a photo, wander off, mess around, set up an new shot, take that pic, move on to the third, etc etc. But you aren’t just taking photographs. What you are really doing is marking “key frames” in an actual video. It’s not entirely obvious (although you figure it out after your first botched attempt … or maybe two) that you have to hold and move the camera BETWEEN the three photos in the same way you would when shooting a standard video.
Once the video is complete, the app then uses the three spots where you clicked “photos” as spots to highlight your subjects and add any text and graphics you wanted to include. If you hold your phone properly for the whole event the effect is startlingly cool, and really lets you tell an immersive little story in just a few seconds of video.
If you don’t keep your phone aimed and moved correctly, you get a shaky and disjointed thing that no one wants to see. At all.
The omission is probably understandable – albeit not excusable – because Prezi is a business software company, and generally deals with a world where customers are more invested in their software purchases and don’t make snap judgements based on a single use. Hopefully the gang at Prezi will fix this quickly, because this is an app that deserves to succeed.
One other caveat for anyone who is concerned about their privacy or data security: The built-in sharing functions use either a Facebook or a Google login, and while Prezi has what looks to be a decent privacy policy, the same can’t be said for the companies who provide those affiliate logins. However, Prezi has included the ability to save your video to your camera roll and share manually via whatever method you want so you don’t need to needlessly expose yourself unless you choose to. Kudos for offering alternatives that should please everyone.
Now that you have been tipped off to the little gotcha, why not download it and take it for a spin? It’s free, it’s fun, and once you figure out how to use it, it looks really really cool.
