SonicPics
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SonicPics lets you easily create narrated slideshows on iOS
SonicPics is an intriguing US $2.99 app that allows you to make a slide presentation and then narrate it, all on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. That's quite a lot of functionality that usually takes a lot more hardware. Take your photos off your camera roll and select them inside SonicPics. Get them in the order you want. Then hit the record button and start narrating. You swipe to the next picture to control the sync. You can swap images around, but then you have to re-do the narration. When you are satisfied, the presentation needs to be rendered, and then it can be emailed, saved to your camera roll, or uploaded to YouTube. The resulting file can run up to 60 minutes duration, if you have the space on your device. You can also select the audio quality. Even the lowest-quality option sounded pretty good. I can see lots of uses for this app, in real estate, education, creating illustrated audio books, and even creating simple presentations when you are on the road. With all my positive comments, there are still some negatives. There is no way to have a music background instead of narration. Even better would be to have narration plus a background track. Although you can label each image as you prepare your presentation, those labels don't make it into the finished video. There is no help or FAQ with the app. You have to be pretty inquisitive to figure out you have to flip each image to the next one while recording. A simple on-screen prompt would fix that. If you are doing a long narration and make a mistake, you have to start over again. That is going to be frustrating. The developer tells me some of those changes are coming, and he agrees about the lack of help (which is easy to fix). I still like this app very much. It is reasonably priced, and the issues I've mentioned are hardly insurmountable for an update. I can see using this on vacation and putting together a quick slide show for friends and family back home. This app is a great idea, and if it continues to evolve it is going to be awesome instead of just very good. %Gallery-161735% #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
App demo: SonicPics
SonicPics does something I'd been wanting an app to do for a long time: create annotated slideshows with timing you direct. The demo speaks for itself, but I have to say that, after testing, it works as advertised. There could be some UI tweaks, but the act of creating slideshows that move to the next slide as you speak and when you want them to move is as simple as it gets. First, you select the photos you want in a show, then you flip to each photo in sequence as you record your voice. The timing of each photo is done in sync to the audio, and that part is quite intuitive. Less intuitive are some of the other controls, but perhaps that's just my penchant for attractively-skinned interfaces. SonicPics has uses beyond simple photo galleries. I could see using this to walk through a UI demo, for example. The app is flexible and can export .m4v files to YouTube or transfer to your Mac using WiFi. You can try the Lite version here, or buy the full version for $2.99.
