Brush Ninja #15: Using your own images?

Hi there - thanks for your patience with this months newsletter.

It's a few days late but hopefully the new feature I've been building will make it worthwhile. You might be able to guess from the email subject but there are actually 2 things I've been working on.

Memberships/ User Accounts

Possibly not the feature you were expecting me to lead with but I have been working on user accounts for Brush Ninja. These accounts will be paid, and entirely optional. All existing features of Brush Ninja will work exactly as they do now for both free and paid users.

The memberships will not store your animations (or track you in any way - I still think your privacy is super important), they are purely to unlock new features and functionality. The first premium feature will be...

Using your own images

This is the feature that has been most requested and I could never work out how to build it - until now!

Now that it's mostly working I am really pleased with how simple it is to use. I hope that you will enjoy using it once it's published.

Membership Pricing

I haven't decided on the pricing but I want to make it pocket money friendly. I want the premium features to be accessible to as many people as possible and I know a lot of younger people use the Brush Ninja website so I will be keeping that in mind when working all this out.

If you are a Patron then you will be able to test the feature before it's published and will get a free account once it's finished - I'll post more information on Patreon once it's ready to be tested.

Why paid accounts?

Brush Ninja is a totally free project that I put a lot of time and effort into, but I currently only earn enough to cover web hosting costs. I'd love to work on Brush Ninja, and similar projects, full time - but to do that I need to make enough money to support my family. I hope that by creating premium accounts I will be able to spend more time on Brush Ninja and keep it running for the long term.

Fun fun fun

I hope you agree that the ability to use your own images is a really fun feature and should open up a lot of potential for creativity.

This coming month or two I will be polishing the image tool and writing the documentation, and doing all the related things that need doing when I release a new feature. In the next week or so I'll be opening this up to Patrons so that I can get some real users trying 'cos that's different to me using it.

User Gallery

Let's not forget the awesome work people post on Twitter. It's great seeing these things, let me know if you do post anything and the best will be added to the gallery.

Thanks - and till next month - Ben