YALSA » App of the Week: TextPics

App of the Week: TextPics

Erin Daly | Apps | Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Title: TextPics by FTW Innovations
Platform: iPhone
Cost: free – .99

Texting is the primary form of communication for lots of teens. It’s cool, it’s quick, and the person receiving the text doesn’t have to respond right away. It’s also been around for awhile, so certain text speak words, emoticons, and little pictures like the heart <3 have made themselves recognizable in mainstream culture. So you’ve certainly seen a wink and a smile, but what if that was taken to the next level? You might end up with something like these:

TextPics offers lots of fun pictures made from ASCII symbols (the letters, numbers, and symbols from your keyboard) and the opportunity to make your own. There are several different categories of pictures: animals, food, romance, celebrations, symbols, japanese emoticons, and more. There is a whole category just for bunnies, just in time for Easter. There are also a surprising number of weapons, swords, guns, even a tank. Which I guess you could use to invent a TextPics based war game, or as a conversation starter about violence in the media. For librarians, you could make a TextPic to advertise a program, or have an art contest for teens to create their own TextPics.

This review refers to the app created by FTW Innovations, but for the iPhone alone, there are text picture apps from a number of other developers as well. The limitation of this particular app is that it only guarantees that it works from iPhone to iPhone. If you send a TextPic to another type of phone, you might end up with formatting issues. So, as an experiment, I send one to a friend with a Droid. Turns out, at least for this particular picture, it worked just fine.