Are you looking for a creative way to share a high-impact visual narrative? Say hello to Thematic, a Web app that emphasizes your presentation’s visuals.
Regardless of whether your story is about a Sunday walk through the botannical gardens, a photo essay of your downtown’s historic architecture or your dog romping on the beach, your photo series will show up in all its full-bleed, attention-grabbing, immersive glory.
Thematic is not a photo album. It’s an app for showcasing events or sequential visuals that share an overriding concept and it’s specifically designed to take advantage of large screens and Retina displays.
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Just drag and drop images from your computer, mobile device or DropBox account to get started. The app accommodates short captions over each photo, if you choose. The presentation can be shared across social networks and embedded in your blog. You can also comment, like, follow and share stories with the community and view stories in 13 categories from photography to sports.
Why start with a Web app as opposed to a mobile app? Aside from catering to a global audience, “We felt that building an HTML5 responsive app that works on the desktop and mobile Web was a great way to build, iterate, test and learn from the product before building a native app,” said Thematic co-founder James Salanitri.
“The app market is hyper-competitive, and when we invest in building an app we want to be sure that we infuse the best features and behaviors we see from the Web.” Thematic’s closest competitors are in the content publishing platform category, like Storehouse and Shorthand, rather than photo sharing apps like Instagram.
While the service is currently restricted to still photos, the company plans to add support for video, animated GIFs and audio, and then integrate with Spotify’s API in the future.
“We imagine more image format support, advanced text options, and even templates that are more specific to certain posting types such as events, collaborative story creation and commerce,” he said. The founders also aim to eventually have Thematic assume a position in the B2B category, with an accessible interface that anyone can figure out.
The emphasis is on preserving ease of use. “We are focused on user experience and aim to create a tool that is intuitive and requires little to no instructions or training. Also, Salanitri said, “Thematic is much more of an ‘image first’ app, in that the image comes first in terms of visualization, and is the primary focus.”
➤ Thematic
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