Custom faces.  A long requested feature for Minivid, and it’s about time we brought it to you.  With just a couple of clicks, you can now use your webcam or a photo to place you and your friends’ faces on our many Minivid actors.  And because we figured Rob wouldn’t mind a few more days of sleep deprivation, Minivid is now integrated with SmugMug to let you have your animation take place anywhere you desire.  Like Paris.

And yes.  Laurence really is that heroic.  Go to http://www.fuzzwich.com and let’s see some new faces.

Yesterday afternoon our extremely handsome and talented Art Department sauntered into the main work area, stroking his mustache and grinning widely at the rest of the team.

After striking a pose reminiscent of the great sculptural works of antiquity, he announced that all human-type actors in the Minivid library now have a set of facial expressions which can be applied to them.

These new actions can be accessed via the “Faces” tab at the top of an actor’s actions list (see fig 1.1 below).

Now you can make them laugh and cry at your leisure!  Toying with someone’s emotions has never been easier.  We can’t wait to see what our users make with this addition.

Enjoy!

::End of Transmission from Team Habit Global HQ::

Oh Boy!

So for you boys and girls out there that haven’t quite found your way through the magic door into animation land, Webmonkey.com has put up a rockin’ tutorial that covers the basics of Minivid. If you’re still stuck at the threshold - interested in animating, but not sure if you can - this tutorial shows you exactly how easy it is to make a cool animation.

Thanks Webmonkey! We love you guys as much as we love ice cream. And, oh man, do we love ice cream.

Until next time, remember kids: coffee grinders are not for putting in microwaves. (that’s what bad, 80’s hair metal CDs are for)

Sometimes you just gotta dance.  Or give flowers.  Or pull out a huge automatic weapon and rabidly fire away. Thanks to the hard work of Rob (programming) and Laurence (art),  Minivid just got a really exciting upgrade.  When speech bubbles and movement just aren’t enough to express your creativity, the Minivid cast now has a plethora of animated actions (get it?)  to really liven up your animation.  Check out the action centric Minivid below.

Actions work very similarly to speech bubbles.   Select an actor, press the   button,  and choose the most enticing action.  Just like that, the action is added to your Minivid and will playback right on cue!

We’re really excited about the options actions bring to the Minivid table.  And even more so, as always, we are really looking forward to the creativity and genius of the Fuzzwich community to take actions in all kinds of unique directions.

So stop reading and take action!
Don’t leave without some satisfACTION!
Be sure to create a thermonuclear reACTION

Ok. I’m done.  Really.

Have fun!

This last week saw the re-debut of Minivid.  As the creativity slowly starts rolling in,  Minivid would like to highlight the past week’s best
Loopt by LukeXI
We don’t need no water by Crazy
Disturbance Report by Pug

We moved.  Again.  This time we find ourselves in the Mission area of San Francisco.  The move was a little more comfortable than the last, probably more long term than Palo Alto, and thankfully did not involve any hotel stays.  We even have more than one room for our  “office space” and a futon in the kitchen to boot!  You can see Chris and Laurence working hard in our new “office space” below.   It’s quite spacious no?

But here at Fuzzwich,  just changing our location wasn’t enough.

We decided to push out a new fuzzwich.com site.  Why change the site, yet again? Well, to be honest, because we have learned so much.  On an regular basis, we looked at our site and commented we could do better.  So we did.  The new site has Fuzzwich firsts, such as navigation.  And consistency. And our favorite, expandibility. Those “features” are only partially listed in jest, as our previous sites have lacked all three.  It has been suprisingly difficult to design a site stylistically unique, as Fuzzwich should be, yet capable of extension as Fuzzwich evolves.    We believe this site has great potential to really grow with Fuzzwich rather than become an obstacle to adding new products and features.

Oh and Minivid was left behind.  You might have noticed the new and improved Minivid, which now runs on and benefits from a brand new Fuzzwich animation platform.  It boasts a new set of completely awesome characters and music, a much larger animation area, and a more clean and polished interface. We will be migrating over all the old user accounts and content in the near future. Check out the sweet new widescreen and characters!

If all these changes weren’t enough, we have also had a personnel change.  Habit is incredibly happy to welcome Chris Patton to the team as our first non-founding member.  Chris has taken the leap from being one of our largest supporters from the “early days of Fuzzwich ” (in quotes because I don’t think we can quite yet claim a time of early days) to working right next to me on a daily basis.  Chris brings a influx of incredible ideas and will be focusing on developing the community and business.  Feel free to give him a welcome call at 555-555-8091.   He’ll appreciate it.  I promise.

Till next time,  animate.

Fuzzwich is making some exciting changes and will be back Tuesday. We won’t blame you for constantly refreshing until then.

About 2 1/2 months ago, we received an email:

“My name is Tomas Fedaravicius and I’m the editor of the biggest IT magazine in the Baltics “New Communications” (”Naujoji Komunikacija”). We’d like to write a review about your website in our next month issue.”

We gladly accepted their interview and of course quickly forgot about it with all the other commotions at the time. Well, a few days ago a random package arrived in the mail with the note along the lines of :

“Dear Ryan, You will find the article about Fuzzwich on pg 38 next to the Manga girl”

We have no idea what the article says or even what language it is in. Hopefully they didn’t misquote us too much! To our knowledge, this is the first in print (as opposed to all the internet coverage) mentioning of Fuzzwich. I assure you it won’t be the last.

Fuzzwich put on a costume. Do you like it? Accompanying the Halloween attire, we pushed out a couple notable improvements last night. At least a few of the common annoyances are out of the way.
Improvements to text bubbles It’s now easier than ever to manipulate text bubbles while making a Minivid. We even color coded everything for you.

The Pick now only plays on page load once a day. I use Fuzzwich as a homepage. Everytime I opened a new browser, I would hear the Pick play. As much as I like the Picard song, there are only so many times a man should have to hear any piece of music.

Never lose a Minivid again due to not being logged in. Forget to log in? No account? No worries. Just go ahead and publish the Minivid under any name. Once you log in or create a new account, you’ll then be given the chance to “claim” any videos you just made.

We won’t forget you now. Fuzzwich was constantly forgetting who you were every time you came to the site. Just check the ‘Remember me’ box on your next login and we won’t make the same mistake again.
The list is far longer of more subtle changes, but we’ll just leave it at that for now. Happy Halloween.

The lady at the front desk thinks we only have two people staying in this hotel room. The more truthful answer would be four, or the entire Habit team. We are a startup and poor and new to Palo Alto. I would like to think she would understand the circumstances of our little fib.Rob headed out to California early last week to check out prospects, and he was so confident in securing opportunities that he only bought a one way ticket. Suffice to say, the rest of us shortly ended up purchasing one way tickets of our own. Hotels rooms have been our home for the last week, as we impatiently wait for our outrageously priced apartments off of University Ave. Rob and Laurence have the added bonus of their apartment serving as an ad hoc office for the next few months. We are very relieved to finally have a somewhat permanent home and place to work together in Palo Alto. Personally, it makes this startup experience far more real. Although California does not quite seem like home yet. I’m sure it will sink in once our old leases expire.

Hopefully everyone is enjoying the new website and the accompanying features. A lot of effort went into the new Fuzzwich. Actually quite a bit more effort than was planned or expected, but well worth it. The daily pick is something we really hope takes off and adds to the community aspect of the site. Our community is currently small, but providing a spacious room rather than a gargantuan stadium for people to interact with really makes the place feel more focused and active.

One of the more challenging, and much internally debated, changes to the site was moving away from AJAX for much of the page flow. In the end, there was not enough justification for breaking so many conventions (especially the use of the ‘Back’ button) for a few tricks that more or less just looked neat. Maybe in the future we can develop a more healthy AJAX approach.

User accounts have been quietly deployed yet disabled and soon to be open to testing. For the perk of being one of the first people to have a fuzzwich.com user account, send us an e-mail at help@fuzzwich.com with ‘User Account Testing’ in the subject if you would like to get involved.