From the makers of Replay, a new app for turning your text into movies and animated GIFs
The app preloads some text for you
Developer Stupeflix is best-known for 2014 App of the Year (as awarded by Apple) Replay, which enables you to transform video clips and photos into seemingly hand-crafted movies, without all the effort and hassle of actually having to hand-craft anything. Legend attempts to do much the same for bite-sized messages you might send on Instagram, Twitter or WhatsApp.
Styles are randomised from a selection
If anything, Legend is even simpler than its predecessor, in terms of workflow. You start off with some pre-loaded text, but can remove that and type up to 100 characters of your own. Optionally, you can add a background image from those already on your iPhone, or download a relevant creative commons image from Flickr via a speedy search. Video backgrounds are also supported.
Each style has several variations
When you’re done, tap Next and you get to select an animated style for your text, and then one of several variations. Your animation is then built and looped before your eyes, while friendly buttons provide the means to send your creation on to Messages, Instagram, or WhatsApp, to save it as a GIF, or to output the resulting movie file to any Share-sheet compatible service or app.
You can share your animation in various ways
During testing, we found that Legend rarely put a foot wrong when it came to text-only animations. The animations you end up with are pleasing if a bit ‘safe’. The choice you’re offered appears to be randomly selected from a larger range than what fits on the screen, though, and so if you’re at any point hoping for a specific style you’ve seen before, it’s pot luck whether you’ll get it again.
Images and videos can be used as backgrounds
Additionally, the app’s razor-sharp focus on simplicity and elegance leaves it feeling inflexible at times. You may find text covering part of your background and end up frustrated that there are no tools whatsoever for fine-tuning Legend’s output — what you see is what you get.
Being able to adjust text positioning would be nice
Still, it’d be churlish to complain too much about what the app isn’t, rather than be entertained by what it is: a simple and fun — if ultimately limited — way to create beautifully animated text messages, all with a couple of taps.
Price: $1.99/£1.49
Size: 74.9 MB
Version: 1.0
Developer: Stupeflix
