Hello - hows things going?

I was going to write this on Monday but my internet stopped working. That’s one of the problems with working digitally, we’re at the mercy of things that we can’t control. It’s working at the moment though so I’m going to finish it off.

I’ve been a bit slow with new features and functionality recently. Sometimes I feel bad about this, like I should be pumping out new features all the time, but Brush Ninja isn’t my job - I need to do other work to earn money to provide for my wife and son (BTW big thank you to my awesome Patrons who continue to support me!). Plus I just need to do other things for my own mental health.

However I’ve recently been getting the Brush Ninja itch again and so I am now building out some new features for the app.

1. Firstly I’ve added a new ‘Comic’ export option. This is similar to the image export but adds a black background which acts as borders around the images to make the images easier to read.
2. I’m adding a ‘Captions’ mode. This lets you add notes to your frames. These can be information about what you’re drawing, or text that you want to display. When you export your animation you will be able to select whether the captions are exported or not (this is what I’m working on at the moment). I suspect this feature will be more useful for comics rather than gifs (where the text may move too quickly).
3. I’ve redesigned the background image uploader, and am planning to add some different background image textures that might be fun to animate on top of.

Along with this I’ve managed to fix a couple of bugs and tweak some behaviours that make Brush Ninja more consistent & logical.

Hopefully my Patrons will be testing the new features next week, and I will be publishing them before the next newsletter.

More Apps?

One of the things I have been thinking about is making Brush Ninja about more than just animation. I’d like to add other apps that would be both useful, and fun. I imagine they would be simpler than the animation tool, but I think there’s a lot of potential to use technology in education and I don’t see a reason I can’t be part of it. I have a list of ideas already but if anyone has anything they have always wanted to see I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Whether it’s improvements to Brush Ninja, or new apps; I’d be interested to know what you want to see. You can reply to this email if you have any suggestions.

Happy Animating - Ben

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