A while ago I decided to replace my aging DS Phat with a nice shiny new DSi, since I’d never bothered with the DS Lite because it wasn’t enough of an upgrade and my old DS worked fine.
For those of you who own a DS Lite and didn’t think the DSi was worth upgrading to I present you with the DSi’s first Killer App: Flipnote Studio.
Flipnote Studio allows you to make flip book animations on your DSi, using the stylus, microphone and even the camera (indirectly, you have to take the photos in the photo app and import them into Flipnote Studio).
Here’s the second animation I created (the first was more a test made during the tutorial and as such wasn’t really publishable)>
It’s pretty simple really just a boat running over a big wave, it took me about 20 minutes to get the whole thing done.
The next one is slightly more ambitious, take a look and see.
I did this during my lunch break at work, and added some finishing touches when I got home, I forgot to add dust coming up from the tyres as the car rolls along, but that’s simple enough to go back and add. This animation is 40 frames long and probably represents about 1hours worth of work.
The ability to upload is available directly from the DSi, and even if you’re not artistic you can download and view animations directly on the DSi, you can even edit and modify and re-upload your own version to the site (it even remembers the original creator, so you can’t pass it off as all your own work).
Even if you can’t connect from the DSi you can use the software to create animated GIFs of your animations (without sound) and save them to SD card where you can post them anywhere with your PC.
So if you ever needed a reason to get a DSi and like the idea of creating your own animations then Flipnote Studio is the coolest little application I’ve used in a long time.