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Review: Pharce

February 19, 2009
Overview Pharce is an odd little app that lets you create funny videos from photos on your iPhone’s photo library. You cut out a crude mouth in the photo and record audio. The mouth will open and close along with your voice in a creepy kind of way. Once you’re finished, you can email it to yourself and even share it with your friends on Youtube. Aww...

Features

  • Add A Little Something Special
You can some animated effects to your video. Oh yeah! You can add eyes, (which blink), glasses, hats, and even an arrow through the head. There’s also angels and devils- one for each shoulder- if you’re into that sort of thing. Pharce also features over 30 sound effects that you can add to your video, like clapping, burping, farting, etc. Spice it up, man! Spice it up!

Breakdown

The Good: Pharce is a lot of fun. Seriously. It’s fun to cut out a mouth and chin and to record the audio. And adding the eyes really makes things ridiculous. What’s great too is that tracing the mouth is really easy and accurate. I was worried my big, dumb fingers would make tracing difficult, but luckily you move a pencil around- and it has a small point.

Adding effects is also really easy. And, more importantly, they’re very responsive once added too. Moving, resizing and tilting are a breeze. My hat is off to NavTools for a job well done with that.

The Bad: Unfortunately, things aren’t all good in this particular hood. The mouth movement could use a little work. If you don’t speak very slowly, the mouth won’t close or even move very much, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a moving mouth. But the big problem I had was that Pharce couldn’t connect to its host to send out the email of the video. I tried and tried. I wanted to share a special video with a special someone- but I was totally denied. Look, there are the pictures to prove it!

Update: At 6:45 in the morning, the host was finally available and the video was sent. But it didn't appear in my email inbox until 3 pm. That's a bit of a lag time, right there. But I got it. And I was able to send it along, just like I wanted to. So, it does in fact, work.

The Verdict

Pharce can be a pretty good time waster. (Isn’t it weird how that’s considered a compliment now?) If the app works like it’s supposed to, (being able to share the video!!!), then it could be a keeper. *It does work, see above. It’s different, you know? And it let’s you be creative. We all need creative outlets. For the current price, I’d recommend it, though I’m hoping that they’ll get the kinks worked out soon.

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