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!

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

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.

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.