Wordify is a fun little OSX app that takes any photo from your hard drive and converts it into word art (like in the header image above). It’s a single-purpose app that does what it says, but with a few more features could be really exceptional.
On the upside, it’s really, really easy to use. Just type words into a box, click on the “play” icon and it builds your image based on the words you’ve input. I did little-to-no noodling other than coming up with lots of words to create the image above, which is meant to be a graphic+textual representation of my Twitter stream.
The UI is very OSX-y, and is pleasant to use. The only confusing bit is that when you generate the image, it automatically launches the Preview app, which is where you actually save the image. Not that big of a deal, but a little odd why the devs would go that route instead of just saving it in the Wordify app.
To Get to 10
There is also no way to save your words – no .wordify format or anything, which kinda blows if you want to make more than one. When you quit the app and re-open, it will have your last set of words pre-populated, but there’s no way I could find to store the word sets for several projects, which means you’d have to save them to a text file or something.
I’d also like to see even a simplistic way of manually weighting words so that some will always be emphasized more than others, more like a weighted keyword tag cloud. I’m always looking for interesting ways to convey data, and this could be a really fun way to present the skills section of a resume or represent other quantifiable terms if this feature ever gets added.
I’d also like to see the ability to use more than one color. Currently, all of the text is one color that you select. I’d love to see gradients, the ability to set certain words to specific colors, and/or the ability the retain the original photographs colors.
Some basic ability to spot-tweak the contrast on images would also be super. Some images are going to work much better than others. Dark images without a lot of contrast will be unrecognizable word mashes unless you manually massage them in an image editor.
Summary
Overall, I like this app and I’m glad I bought it. The $3.99 price tag isn’t too crazy, but it feels just a little steep given the limited features. I hope the devs continue to develop and add new features over time.
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