Posted by Ryan Johnson on 04 9, 2010

Red Dwarf The Dibblifier

Categories: Entertainment, | 0 comments | |

If you lived in the UK in the late 1980′s and 90′s then you certainly know all about the popular British comedy Red Dwarf. Now with the help of Grant Naylor Productions Ltd and their app Red Dwarf The Dibblifier you can transform yourself, friends and family into Dibbley’s!

To begin Dibblifying you can either choose a pic from your photo library or snap a fresh one. Once ready you’ll see a series of colored dots and lines that you need to line up on the face. Just touch the dots to move them. Once you’ve got ‘em where they need to be, press the Dibblifier button and watch ‘em go! Before your eyes the pic will morph from normal, to completely Dibblified, big crazy teeth and all! Once finished you can choose to edit the pic, save it within the app to “My Dibbley’s” create a video showing the transformation, and can share your Dibblified image or video via Facebook, Twitter (image only), or email.

One thing’s for sure, everything about this app will have people reminiscing about Red Dwarf’s glory days. Not only can you use it to Dibblify people and pets alike, you can also download full seasons of the television series straight from iTunes. That being said, I have to admit that I was disappointed with the overall performance of this app. I found the quality of the Dibblified images, the interface, the instructions on how to Dibblify, and the number of available options to be sub par for the $2.99 price.

How did I come to these conclusions? Well, it took me quite a few tries to figure out how to create the best Dibbley’s. With an app this simple I expected it to be very quick and easy. I tried it out a few times without reading any instructions and the results were really bad. So from there I went straight to the help page. Once there the first thing I noticed was the extremely small font. While squinting my way through the Help page I learned that instead of the Help page telling me how to Dibblify it told me to go to the Info page to find the instructions. I immediately thought to myself, “Why wouldn’t it tell me on the Help page?”. Definitely not the most user friendly layout.

After getting the hang of it I was able to Dibblify my pics pretty well. One thing I noticed is that close up, straight forward facing pics work best. As you can see from my pic below, pics where faces are tilted don’t come out very well. For me, I’d like to see quite a bit of improvement to this app for it to be worth the money. I’d like to see some additional editing options added so you can use a wider variety of pics and still get good results. Features like the ability to move/edit/crop/re-size images would be nice. I also would like to see the interface laid out a little better. In addition to what I mentioned about the help page, I found that after you Dibblify a pic and save or share it the same menu keeps popping up continuously until you choose to exit the page. I realize this doesn’t sound bad, but trust me, you’ll choose the same option more than once before you realize you need to exit the page. It really should just go back to the main page on it’s own. The ability to edit a previously saved Dibbley would be nice addition as well.

Overall I’d say this app has promise, but it needs quite a bit more work done before it’s worth the $2.99 price point. I can see where the Dibblified images have the potential to generate some laughs, but as it stands today I found the sub par quality of my Dibbley’s to generate more confusion than laughter.

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