Now that my head has stopped shaking from the $1 billion purchase of Instagram, I’ve started looking more closely at the touch generation of content creation tools on our mobile devices. After sharing Snapseed with a friend, her response was, “Wow, some of those techniques would take ten times longer in Photoshop.” And she is right. Today’s mobile creation tools are a finely compounded and restrained counterpart to their desktop heritage.
It is in their restraint that creativity is found for those that were overwhelmed by desktop software. These new tools take what has been done by digital designers for years and brings them intuitively into everyone’s hands. And now we usher in an even more rapid adoption of creative output than we saw with digital video over the past ten years.
But filters are so yesterday – now we can create 3D models, 360 degree spins, animations and more with our phones and tablets. Content creation has quickly moved beyond the single image into easier-than-ever before toys that create more complex content. My six year old has been playing non-stop with the LEGO® Super Hero Movie Maker – http://itun.es/iP557Z and Action Movie FX – http://itun.es/iP55d8 which are both radically fun, simple and has him making movies versus shooting Instagram photos. Other interesting new (and free) apps to play with are Moquu photo scratcher – http://itun.es/iP55Pj and SpinCam – http://itun.es/iP55Pg which make creating stop-motion and 360 degree movies easy and enjoyable.
The same device that simplified a traditional camera to make taking pictures fun for a four-year old is about to do the same with more interactive content. And that is where Billion dollar businesses are made – the ones that open the doors for anyone to tell their story in a rich way.