Sky Writing HD For iPad Now Worth The Price
July 23, 2010
Just days ago I told our readers about Sky Writing HD for iPad and suggested that an update would improve the app significantly. That update arrived today.
The app allows you to write a smoke message "in the sky" just as an airplane does in real life. After a little while the message simply wafts away. Priced at $2.99, the 2.0 version added some important touches that now make the app worth the price. These include the ability to increase the time before your message disappears, as well as the addition of cool backgrounds like skies, beaches and famous city skylines. Also, messages now float behind buildings as they do in real life. You can also delete the message quickly by shaking the iPad. I recently had the opportunity to chat with the app's creator, Jeff Wolverton, who is actually a Hollywood visual effects expert. He's the guy that gave the Goblin Glider its smoke in the first "Spider-Man" movie. Adding the imaginary smoke to Sky Writing HD for iPad isn't new to the creator. You can check out the other movies that he lent his smoke and atmospheric effects to on IMDB.com.
I'm a big fan of atmospheric phenomena; things like smoke, clouds & steam move in real life fascinates me. With the iPad, there was a chance to make stuff you can not just see, but also touch and interact with, which I think is really cool. So I started just messing around with making some simple smoke, trying to get movement that looked natural, and it occurred to me during those tests it looked a little like sky writing, so I went in that direction as far as I could!In terms of future surprises for Sky Writing HD for iPad, Wolverton concluded that:
The customers are the best source for that. I'm going to add a "pick you own background" option, but I'm going to try to make it so the program can figure out where the sky is (and isn't) in your picture, so then it can work like New York, Paris and the Palm trees backgrounds currently do; your sky writing appears BEHIND the foreground. I like the idea of somebody taking a picture of themselves with the sky in the background, and then can make it look like there was sky writing there when they took it. (If somebody someday uses this to write "marry me" and propose to somebody, I'll have done my job!)In addition to Sky Writing HD for iPad, the creator has released Pop It! HD under his HotNFunnyIphoneApps brand. The first five people that email me (bryan@appadvice.com) will be sent a free promo code for the app!
