

Show HN: my useless weekend project, add speech bubbles to images - chezmo
http://phrase.it/

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kurtvarner
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."

~~~
olalonde
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.

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

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olalonde
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>

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kitcar
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>)

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diminish
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.

~~~
Gmo
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.

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arscan
>> 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!

~~~
kaybe
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!

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sushantsharma
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.

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

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

~~~
chezmo
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.

~~~
marquis
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.

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

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ya3r
Simple and nice. I would suggest adding a third option to take a photo from
webcam.

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

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

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

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

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

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nvr219
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).

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bpfh
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?

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therandomguy
<http://i.imgur.com/Sq8Kd.jpg>

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

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

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

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

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

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kaliblack
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.

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

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rtpg
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

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fastball
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.

~~~
chezmo
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.

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Suan
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.

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stewie2
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.

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robbiea
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.

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jneal
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>

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bryanjos
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!

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roryokane
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.

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damon_c
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!

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

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bharad
Good work. What did you use to build it?

~~~
chezmo
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>)

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

Also, add some more fonts ;)

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vlaube
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

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mung
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?

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KMBredt
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.

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

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mijustin
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.

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alagappanr
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.

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

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

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

Fun little project anyway :)

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zoidb
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 :/

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tsurantino
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!

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qxf2
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.

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basheertome
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.

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jasdeepsingh
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.

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

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switch007
Cool! I found it difficult to place the call-out in the right position because
a smaller version is showed while dragging.

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

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

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sandeepeecs
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 ?

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

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

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bluethunder
<http://phrase.it/show/gYTbo>

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

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

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username3
I couldn't find a way to change bubble type after dragging it in.

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thedangler
Just wondering how you render the final image?

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

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julien_c
Pretty cool. How did you implement filters?

~~~
chezmo
instagraph library (<https://github.com/webarto/instagraph>)

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rgonzalez
This shit is pretty awesome. Good stuff.

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Gobitron
This is fun and works nicely.

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cotsog
This is great. Kudos.

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joren
simple idea, beautifully made, love it!

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BklynJay
Looks great!

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akhilrex
i like it :)

Note: Not useless

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zapt02
Very neat!

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irfan
"take a random photo" might be NSFW

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jaequery
facebook would love this

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mavci
where is the gallery?

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

