App Review: Boldomatic

I was contacted by a representative from Boldomatic who wanted me to check out their app. They had stumbled across my review of Whims, and thought I might be interested since its another “words as pictures” type app.

I’m always interested in new apps so I gave it a shot. When the representative said “it’s similar, yet so very different” he wasn’t kidding.

How is Boldomatic different?

Boldomatic is different because it’s simple. This is either good or bad, depending on how you look at it. There are two options when you create your text. What do you want your text to say, and what color of a background do you want it on. That’s it. You don’t choose your font. You don’t choose your font color. You don’t choose your font size. Just the background color and what the text itself says. Simplicity is key in Boldomatic.

What does Boldomatic do well?

Boldomatic has a few features that set it apart from other “words as pictures” apps.

No Banners

There are no banners advertising the service. WHen I post a Whim, there’s always a Whims banner at the bottom (here’s an example). I understand they need to promote, and heck it’s how I found Whims. But it sometimes it gets in my text which makes me twitchy.

Community Involvement

Boldomatic gets that you have to give people a reason to use your service, and a reason to come back. So they have weekly contests. Some of the contests even have prizes. Right now they’re running a shirt design one, and you win the shirt. There’s been ones when you can get included in press releases.

Where can Boldomatic improve?

Assuming you like Boldomatic’s no-nonsense format, I think it needs a couple of features to really improve.

Font Sizing

The first is that resizing needs to be an option. Maybe not to the degree of other apps. But see how the period is kind of on its own in the third line? That’s because that’s the font size Boldomatic chose for me. I had to put the “This is” above it just so the word “Boldomatic” wouldn’t stretch across two lines. Either give a font sizing option or tweak the algorithm to realize one word and any punctuation after it needs to be on one line. You can get around this with creative uses of line breaks and spaces. For example, for the first image in this post I made the text smaller by pressing enter a few times. I had to do this so the word “Boldomatic” didn’t spread across two lines.

Comments

Sometimes I want to put a little backstory to my picture. Or a link to a relevant post. In Boldomatic you can’t do it when you post. You can add tags and mentions, but not actual comments. If you try, every word in your sentence gets a hashtag. The only time you can add comments is after you’ve posted the image.

Spell Check

This is an app that is all about making words your focus. Please make sure I spell things correctly.

Social

You can currently share your Boldomatic posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. This is a good start. However, you can only post to a personal Facebook page, not a Page Facebook page. And there is no Instagram or Flickr support. Those two networks are huge for sharing images, so I feel they really need to be included.

Will I use Boldomatic?

Most likely not. I might peek in every once in awhile, because of the contests mentioned above. Don’t get me wrong, Boldomatic is a technically good app. It’s intuitive and stable. And if you just want simple words on solid background it will do that well. But for me personally, Boldomatic is just too simple and plain. I like the fun of textures and fonts, of sizing and spacing. Its just not as much fun for me.

If that’s the kind of app your looking for though, you can get it for free in the iOS app store.