oskarahl

Hi HN,

Creating lots of marketing visuals in different resolutions for all the social media platforms out there in multiple languages is time-consuming and frankly really annoying.

I wanted to make a solution for this that is fun / cheap / fast and that can be used by both developers and non-developers (such as designers and digital marketers).

I built the entire app solo while working full-time. The most fulfilling parts has been the technical challenges and also the challenge of building a product with hopefully “smooth” and beautiful UI/UX - as my day job has been very enterprisey lately.

App is currently sitting at 1,000+ users of which a handful are active and using it for: Automated open graph images, User generated content e.g. reviews or new e-commerce listings to social media graphics

The app consists of four tools: 1. API: each layer (e.g. text / image) that is added in the image editor can be changed with the API. 2. Spreadsheet: Add a row in a spreadsheet and create an image from the row content. 3. Form A simple visual way to create multiple resolutions at once + can be shared. 4. Zapier integration for no code automations.

What makes it unique: Easy to generate images for multiple resolutions / sizes for each template. Cheaper, funner (and faster?) than the alternatives.

Best tech choices: Next.js + Vercel serverless functions - fast and great development experience. react-moveable for the image editor itself. Checkly for API and e2e tests - super easy to use and setup.

Biggest technical mistake: Firebase and firestore: huge bundle size + reading and writing to firestore is just too slow + it’s hassle to get it to work with Next.js and SSR.

Obs: Signing up for an account is required for the API but there are two open demos: one for generating OG images and one for generating device image grid.

Thanks let me know how it goes, ah I updated the domain yesterday and didn't remember to update the welcome email - thanks!

I made a web app where you can create marketing images and videos of your saas app / software product.

Built it for fun - mainly to learn puppeteer, how to set up auth, node.js, GSAP and how to write serverless functions.

Biggest highlight so far: got featured in the Google official blog.

App here: https://glitterly.app

An web-based video creation tool where you can create short animated videos. Similar to Kapwing but focused on videos and with more animations and effects.

Still far from complete but it's been used for a couple of notable product hunt launch videos already such as bufferi.ng. And for a couple of blog posts of Supabase.

Not profitable or anything at the moment and looking at various niches where to take the product, could e.g. be used to automate news highlight videos from news articles (similar to the Onions instagram stories).

Link: https://glitterly.app/

Hi folks of HN,

I built this highly useful(?) tweet to animated video generator. I built it for fun, to get better at GSAP, and to test the waters for my video renderer service for Glitterly.

I’m not sure if there is any product-market fit for a tool like this and I have no idea who a potential user who would need this product would look like. But I came across Pikaso.me and they seem to have some traction for their tweet to image generator, so maybe there is hope.

Current features: - Paste a tweet url, customise the tweet video with theme, background, animations

Potential features: - Generate png, jpeg image - More themes with your own branding (logo and colors) - Anything else? I’m open to ideas / collaborations

Months of covid confinement and getting stuck in a work visa limbo in Malaysia meant I got the chance to work on my side projects undisturbed the past few months. Not really sure if glitterly.app will work out at all. But had a ton of fun building it. Probably learnt more about UI/UX, marketing, sales, product from doing this than anyplace else.

It all started because I wanted to build a changelog, but one that came with videos of what changed. So I made a simple tool that allows you to zoom in on a video. Friends and family had fun making cute videos of their dogs and whatnot.

Then I grew obsessed, and 3 months of midnight coding later built a second/current iteration - a video editing app for making short animated videos for social media. Hasn’t made any money yet, but I’m trying my best.

App here: https://www.glitterly.app/

Interesting, ended up using FFmpeg. It's heavy to run and it takes time to write all the code for overlaying elements on top of each other and drawing text etc - but the quality is great.

Well done! I like how you handle multiple scenes, it's easier this way vs e.g. how clipchamp does it.

I'm the creator of Glitterly - https://glitterly.app/ a similar video editor but more focused on pure feature videos with zooming and transitions. Initially for exporting videos I tried a similar approach but with canvas. By recording the canvas with captureStream and exporting the video, but I wasn't able to get a satisfactory non-laggy output.

What upcoming new features are on your roadmap for Tella?

Love the feature preview videos, what did you use to create them?

Great, let me know how it goes :)

That's awesome let me know how it goes. The border can be removed by pressing the "undo" button (perhaps the ui/ux for this could be a bit clearer - i'll see what I can do).

Currently no title/subtitle support yet (outside of the intro scene), but it's something i'll start working on asap as it's been requested by quite a few users already.

Thanks! Yes sliding in texts / headers / annotations are on the upcoming features list. Any specific kind of text widgets that you are thinking of?

Thanks! The video transformations can be a bit time-consuming (especially right now as there is quite a bit of traffic from hackernews) - I'll add a proper loader so you can see how much time is remaining. Admittedly I haven't tested much with firefox, i'll check if there is an issue with the download itself.

Thanks for the feedback, very impressive that you exited Automagical.

1. Haha oh no, I'll have to look for alternatives to Giphy then.

2. Yes i've been eyeing this for a while as the GL-transitions are really smooth, I plan to add it once I release further support for multiple screens.

Thanks for checking it out.

1. Currently it's a web-based video editor (so no download required) where you edit screen recordings, so at the moment you'll need to record your screen and then upload it.

2. I see, maybe adding a "skeleton" loader overlay over content that's not affected by the core feature would handle this? e.g. something like this: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1275154148938461185

Thanks for the suggestion it's a good point of view that I hadn't considered yet.

Currently it's completely free and open to use for anyone, but I'll run out of free digital ocean server credits one day :)

Did you get a chance to try out the video editor itself, what do you think?

Thanks! i'm happy to keep it free in exchange for feedback :) would love to hear their thoughts at [email protected]

Hi HN,

I’m a big fan of following feature updates for my favourite apps, and I’ve always wondered how they make videos that have all these nice transitions and zooms.

And so I wanted to create a product that a non-professional video editor / solo developer / bootstrapping tech founder can use to edit a screen recording of your app.

Features: - Add padding and set a frame from Unsplash - Gifs - Highlight user interactions with a zoom - Transitions and animations.

Use cases: feature demos, presentations, social media posts, “how to” videos.

Putting my MVP out here, and keen to hear your feedback.

FFmpeg started out as frustrating for me but the more I use it the more I love it. The ability to split videos into smaller segments and applying different filters to each segment and finally combining the segments is just great.

I've been working on a web-based video editor for app features: https://glitter.now.sh/ and i've had tons of fun tweaking FFmpeg.

My only wish would be that the documentation would include video samples for the example commands (I'd love to help with this).

I just launched my blog today coincidentally:

Bite-sized programming concepts with interactive challenges in repl.it

https://www.bitecodingbits.com/

Why? because it's just so hard to learn a concept by merely reading a blog post without implementing a basic version it yourself.