Colibri: A New Form of Art for A New Age of Artists
Developed on Appcelerator Titanium, Colibri is an application for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to create unique works of art. Neither a picture nor a movie, Colibri creations feature a variety of effects and pictures that interact over the course of a minute. Users can upload pictures from their mobile device library and add moving effects from Colibri’s library, changing the background color and controlling the placement and duration of the effects and pictures. This allows users to tell a story with their art as well as express emotion in a way that is difficult to do with still pictures.
Colibri also has its own community as users can register and share their creations with other users throughout the world. Users can view the creations of others at random or they can see the ones with the most views or the most likes; they can also follow their favorite users and monitor the users who follow them. Users can also send personal messages to one another and find friends based on the similarity of their work.
Although the developer of the app, Yury Bogomolsky, created the app for his own use, he decided that its unique means of expression warranted sharing. After adding social elements, he released it in the App store for free with the aim of revolutionizing the way that friends share emotion with one another online. Yury, who has been programming professionally for twenty-five years, has tried almost every development tool available. He’s created more than ten modules, several of which have been featured on the front page of Titanium Studio for four months; some of his modules include Codebug, Pageflip and Cloudfire.
According to Yury, he “couldn’t have made an app as good as Colibri without Titanium […] You can’t do Colibri in Phonegap.” Yury also plans to add music functions and a TV module to Colibri in the near future as well as many other features, which he has yet to disclose. It uses MongoDB and Parse.com as its databases, but it will likely make use of cloud services in the future.
For more on Yury and his apps, follow him on Twitter @iwakeapp