Online Shouting Is Encouraged On Peach
Hands On With Peach’s Best Feature
The Peach app and social network launched just over a week ago, and for almost that entire time, the tech community has debated whether or not it has any staying power.
The common (and mostly fair) criticism of Peach is that it’s not entirely clear what the app is supposed to be, or that it fails to differentiate itself from the competition. In an earlier overview of the platform, I likewise outlined all the similarities it has to competing networks, including Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
It does, however, have one feature that’s fun, useful, and not quite like anything offered by any other network — the “Shout” module.
Peach has a list of special commands, Magic Words, that trigger unique functions. For example, if a user types “weather,” Peach will post their local temperature and conditions. “Dice” will roll a pair of digital dice. “Song” uses the phone’s microphone to identify what the user is currently listening to.
When users first experiment with Peach, it’s not uncommon to see them go through a series of the Magic Words, experimenting with what’s possible. The most commonly-used feature after users have acclimated, though, appears to be “Shout,” which allows users to make an Instagram-sized image with colors, text, or even rudimentary animation.
How do you properly Shout on Peach? With just a few easy steps, you’ll be bellowing like a pro.
1. Activate the Shout module:
This is simple. Pull up your personal feed, and start to type shout. You’ll see a button pop up at the bottom of the screen that says “shout: Big words”.
Press it.
2. Pick a color or image.
This is the screen you’ll see after activating Shout. You can drag the color slider on the bottom to choose the background color, or click on the black and white circle to make a black or white background.
If you’d like to use an image as the background instead, you can double click the black and white circle, or following the update, click on the image icon to the left of the color slider. This will pull up your image gallery of phone pics and downloaded images, you can pick anything and crop to a 1:1 ratio to bring it into Shout.
If you’re using an image as the background, you can have a color overlay with the slider, or make it light or dark using the circle.
Don’t worry too much about colors, just pick something that looks good for you. Shout will pick your text color automatically based on the background color you use to make the text visible.
3. Add text.
Type whatever you’d like into the Shout. You can use simple text, or emoji.
Clicking on the text will italicize it (not emojis, though), and pinching can resize the text to fill the screen or just take a line or two.
4. Animate.
You can make a Shout animated by stringing together multiple static Shout images. When you’re done with the current frame and ready to move on to the next one, press down on the Shout image and drag your finger to the left.
Two new buttons will pop up on bottom, with the option to add a new frame. Press it.
5. Publish.
When you’re done with either your single image or animation, press the “Done” button at the bottom right of your keyboard. This will bring you back to your feed and allow you to either publish the Shout by itself, or add text or another Magic Word component to the post.
6. Get creative.
The animated Shout below was created using previously-made Shouts as background frames, then typing over them. Peach makes this particularly easy to do, since any Shout you created is automatically added to your camera roll when you press “Done” — whether or not you actually publish the Shout to your feed.
The process for making this Shout was creating four static images with a black background and regular text, knowing they’d be saved to the camera roll. Then I started a new Shout, bringing in each plate, selecting a black overlay, and retyping the text, this time making it italicized, to create the animated gif with the ghosting-style text overlay. I created the emoji effect by pressing the spacebar before typing the emoji during the animation assembly.
Some other interesting creative opportunities offered through the Shout module:
- Animating images from the web by zooming in or out on subsequent frames
- Creating a simple cartoon by creating frames in the “Draw” module, then bringing them into the Shout module for assembly
- Layering images and text several times to create a multiple exposure effect.
That’s it. The controls for Shout are pretty rudimentary. Far more image control and manipulation is possible through other applications, like OVER, Snapseed, or even Instagram or Snapchat depending on the goal of the user.
The benefit, though, is within Peach you can create a simple image macro in just a few seconds. Since it’s saved to your phone even without publishing it onto your Peach feed, you can easily use your creations on other social platforms as you please.
I’d be curious to see if the Peach team pivots in the future, highlighting the Shout feature or even spinning it off entirely into a standalone application. Until then, though, open up your feed, type shout, and
Joe Filipas is an OP (Original Peacher). He works in advertising in Minneapolis as a senior strategist on the social team at Periscope (not that Periscope), and is a video producer in his free time. You can connect with him on Twitter at @joefilipas, or on Peach at @peachinfluencer, where he shares all kinds of delightful internet garbage.
For further reading, take a look at his overview of Peach, and his roundup of the best John Stamos posts.
