Howdy - I hope everyone is well.
I have been very busy this month. What with Twitter going wrong and Brush Ninja memberships I’ve had a lot on my plate.
The Gallery
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and sacked a large chunk of the staff I have been concerned about the direction the platform is heading in.
Previously I was hosting the gallery content on Twitter itself, but since I don’t know how long it will be around I decided to host everything on my servers. But this meant downloading all of the videos and images that have been posted, which was rather time consuming.
It was a lot of work that I wasn’t expecting to have to do, but the plus side is that I can now host videos from Instagram. All you have to do is tag your Instagram posts with #brushninja and I will find and upload them.
Brush Ninja Members
I have been working on polishing the membership experience. I’ve added a few small extras and tweaked those that are there.
In particular I have added colour palettes. This is a feature I’ve wanted for a while and last month I found time to add it in. There’s more info on the blog, but essentially you can now select from pre-defined colour selections. Free users get 5 palettes - including skin tones which users have asked for many times.
I also improved the Photo Collage app. I added more background colours, and fixed a couple of bugs. Finally I added a bunch of extra photo layouts. I think these new features really flesh out the app making it more complete.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday
This was my first Black Friday and so I went for it - the offer was 50% off for the first 6 months - and the offer is running until December 7th.
Top Tip: If you use the coupon on the yearly subscription it will work out to half price for the year.
There won’t be any more offers this year so if you’re interested it’d be worth grabbing it while you can.
Audio
I collect feedback for Brush Ninja, and the biggest piece of feedback I’ve had recently is that people want to be able to add sound to animations. So I’m adding it.
I don’t normally talk about things in advance but since the feature is coming along really well I wanted to share my excitement.
In version one you will have a collection of sound effects that you can turn on individually on each frame. This feature will be free for everyone, with Members getting access to a larger selection of sounds - but don’t worry, I will make sure there’s a decent selection for everyone.
Thanks!
Thanks for supporting Brush Ninja Whether you’re a member or not I want you to know that I am thankful for all the people who use Brush Ninja, and share it with their friends.
I know there’s a lot about Memberships in this newsletter and I’ll try not to mention it so much moving forward, but if Memberships continue growing as they are then I think I will be able to work on Brush Ninja full time and make even more fun stuff for everyone.
All the best - Ben