Flip It! Lite for iPhone/Touch/iPad App Review

This week and next week are the craziest weeks of the spring for us as coaches.  I have four games and will work at two track meets and this year I add my son’s four t-ball games.  While I was on my weekly search for an app for the Blue Plate Special, I decided I wanted something fun and different.  The craziness of work made me not want to do something productive or the usual games.  I stumbled upon Flip It! Lite and my interest was piqued.

Remember the days of youth when you spent a boring class period in school drawing a flip cartoon in the corner of your textbook of a bouncing ball or dancing stick figure?  Well…there is an app for that!  At probably late elementary or Jr. High School age I remember filling up every corner of a notebook or textbook with these little animations.  They usually consisted of a person performing a sports move or getting knocked down.  The idea of this fun, youthful experience on the iPhone was too much to pass up.

Flip It! Lite brings the idea of drawing your very own digital flip book and combines it with seven drawing tools.

* Pen
* Eraser
* Line
* Rectangle
* Filled Rectangle
* Ellipse
* Filled Ellipse

All of the tools are found at the top of the screen after a simple screen tap.  Clicking on the pencil icon will reveal the above tools.  The dot icon allows the artist to adjust the line width.  This adjustment works with the free draw pen as well as the shapes and eraser.  Word of advice is to not adjust if you plan on continuing a drawing until that part is finished.  You can always go back to add more to each page, but it is difficult to change the width and get it back to match the prior page.  The pallet icon allows to change colors.  This will work to draw or as fill and adds a nice effect to the flip book cartoon.  The curved arrow icon is an undo button which only undoes the last command.  Unfortunately it will not go back further.  It would be nice to be able to undo each part of a page.  When a new page is added, the previous page is visible to assist in lining up and advancing the animation.

The slider bar on the bottom of the screen will take you to each page.  This comes in handy to add animations or edit pages.  The plus sign adds a new page or you can hold the button to insert or copy the current page.  If the cartoon contains a static item, copy and add the page then add the animations to them.  Nice touch.

Play the animations anytime by tapping the play button.  Control the speed and play forward or backward from the play screen.  The home screen will show all animations and allow to delete or edit their information.  You may also choose background colors or pictures from the camera roll to edit over from the information screen.

**The animation used for the screen shots was created by my pitcher Reagan, Caitlyn and Katelyn who are my catchers and Frazier from my first period class.  They were pretty amused and proud of their animation work!

Flip It! Lite is limited to five saved animations and fifty pages per cartoon.  For $1.99 the full version allows for unlimited saves and page numbers.  If this is something you might be interested in, the Lite version is a great start.  Get Flip It! Lite here in the app store for free and start animating!

What I like: The ability to create a flip book on the iPhone is a great idea.

What could use improvement: I think the ability to share the actual animation is a must add to later versions.  The kids who made the animation I used for the screen shots would love to share their poor stick man being smashed by the bouncing ball for all of you.