Ultratext, available for free on the App Store, is a new and fun iPhone app to create animated GIFs from text and selfies, and share them with others through iMessage, Instagram, or other services. I discovered the app yesterday thanks to a tweet by Casey Newton, and I’ve been using it all day to send animated messages to my friends and family. The idea seems to resonate with normal people in my life and the app is indeed simple and enjoyable, hence it’s worth a mention on the site.
When you open Ultratext, the app launches into a compose mode that lets you type text you want to turn into an animated GIF. There are no cloud accounts, no In-App Purchases, and no “social” requirements – you just type text, which is converted into uppercase in a preview at the top. Each word can be assigned specific background and text colors, which will result in flashy and bold animations when converted to GIF. If you want to retouch words you’ve already typed, you can just tap a word to put the cursor next to it and edit colors again.
At any point while typing, you can tap a camera button to add a photo to the animation. This is intended for selfies, I assume, but you can switch to the rear camera and also activate the iPhone’s flash if you need to. You can add multiple photos to each GIF and intermix them with words, which can result in funny (or potentially awkward) effects in the end. In my tests, I used my face for selfies.
When you’re done, tap Return on the keyboard and the app will create a GIF that you can share to iMessage, Instagram, Email, and “More”. The latter includes system services such as Mail and Facebook, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t support iOS’ Open In menu (it would have worked well with GIFwrapped) and it saves GIFs as videos to the Camera Roll. iMessage sharing worked well – sending GIFs actually sent .gif files to the Messages app, but I don’t like the fact that the app adds a “Made with Ultratext” blurb by default.
Ultratext is a simple app meant to send silly messages with bright colors and selfies, and I like the idea a lot. It’s free on the App Store.
