Review: Morph123

Overview If you've ever wanted to see if you and your dog have any family resemblance, then this is a crazy-fun app. Even better is taking a picture of friends or family, setting the morph points, and then watching this fun app transpose the pictures in real-time motion to give you an idea of what you might could do if you were the shape shifter, Mrs. McGonagall, from Harry Potter.

Functionality First of all, read the instructions. You'll spend several minutes in frustration otherwise. I generally jump smack into a program, but with Morph123, I had to admit defeat, backup, and read the manual. After a quick review, you'll be morphing in no time. Essentially, there are only two images that you can compare with each morph. You will set one picture as the "Destination" and one picture as the "Source." You do that my clicking on the tab at the top of the screen and then adding your image from either the camera or the photo library. You'll be presented with a default image of a cat when you first load up the program. It will have crosshair symbols all over it. Change the image out with your own, and you'll be ready to go.

The way you edit your morph points is first of all to get rid of what's already on the screen. The default is simply too many, I've found. All you have to do to get rid of the morph points (cross hair symbols) is to shake the iPhone. Yup. It's that easy. Pretty cool, huh? Like an Etch-a-Sketch. Be careful when you're working though, if you sneeze hard, you'll lose your work as your reflex-sneeze-jerk flails your morph points away.

I generally set my morph points on the center of the forehead, one on each eye, on the tip of the nose, on the middle of the mouth, and one on the chin. You can add more to experiment. You double-tap the screen to add a morph point, and you simply tap on a morph point to edit, or move it. When you tap on a morph point, it will turn green, allowing you to move it around. When it's green, you can also shake your iPhone to erase just that one.

After you're done adding points, you tap on the "Morph" button, and you're presented with a short animation featuring your blending of the two images. You'll laugh; you'll cry.

You can share your images (beginning, end, and a middle image) via email or save it as a photo in your library, but you can't at present share your video morph.

Review I've used this app several times with families to show them similarities between moms and kids or dads and kids. It's a remarkably fun conversation piece that really brings out the "wow" from folks. I'm puzzled as to why you can't share the video morph. It almost takes the fun out of the whole thing. That's a must-add feature for the future. I've had some problems every now and then getting the morph points to become editable. I find myself tapping harder and harder in frustration trying to get them to "go green" to no avail. Other than that, I've not found any other bugs, so to speak. Summary Morph123 is a fun, innocent little app that surprisingly will earn its way onto your springboard. It's one of those nice additions to your iPhone arsenal that will make kids, adults and even the most jaded Mac hater smile. Maybe you could morph Google and Microsoft and get a company that can find itself?

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