It's Time To Spruce Up Your Images With Over: Text+Photos
Over: text+photos ($1.99) by Potluck will make any image more informative, creative, or even funny, just by letting you add some text to it. This is text sans labels, as you would find in Labelbox. But it's not just the ability to add words in that makes this app great — it's the attractive interface.
The first thing you’ll see after the gorgeous splash screen will be the screen for getting an image. The app allows you to snap a new image from the iPhone camera or you can import from your device Photo Library. Once you have an image, the fun will commence.
The next screen will consist of your image and some text, which you can edit by double-tapping it. The best part of Over is the fact that you are not limited to how much text you have — go ahead, write as much as you want. The text color can be changed, though you only have a spectrum of blacks and whites to work with. Once you finalize your text, it will show up on your image, where you can move it anywhere with a tap-and-drag gesture.
What's with the yellow triangle that is sticking out from the right side of the screen? Tap it, and you'll reveal a pop-out semicircle menu with several options to scroll through: Home, Font, Tint, Size, Align, Save, About, and Share. Three options are displayed at a time, and you can hide the menu by tapping anywhere on the screen. This kind of menu reminds me of the one used in ISO500, but that's not a bad thing. It is still fairly unique — you don't see this type of menu a lot — and it works.
While I like the default font used for text, you may prefer something different. The Font option will bring up a list of available typefaces, which have a variety of fun ones, mixed with some serifs and san-serifs. There’s the option to access all fonts that are supported on iOS, but it will cost you $0.99 to unlock them. I was a bit annoyed with this, since the app already cost $1.99 to download — shouldn’t it include all of these standard (and not so standard) fonts already? For now, I’ll just be sticking with the fonts that are included in the app.
The Tint option allows you to adjust the brightness of the image only — text isn’t affected. There are nine different levels, so you can find the level that makes the text really pop. Text can be adjusted between 18 sizes, ranging from extremely tiny and hard to see to gigantic and in-your-face. You can also change the text alignment, from left to center to right justification.
While there are enough options for customizing your text, I am a bit disappointed that there is no way to add more than one layer of text on an image, unless you save and import it again.
Once you’re done adding words to your image, you can save it directly to your Camera Roll. If you’re in a sharing mood, you can post it to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or just send it by email.
I’m not usually in the mood to add text to my images, but I think when I do feel the need to, I’ll be using Over: text+photos. It makes the process extremely easy, and the app is just downright beautiful to look at and use. I just hope that someday, the developer makes it possible to add multiple text layers on a single image — that would make this app perfect, as well as having more colors for text. But until then, it’s still pretty darn close.
So what are you waiting for? Time to spruce up those photos of yours with some words of wisdom or laughs, whatever floats your boat!
