Couple of weeks ago I attended Drinking and Drawing Boston, a hand drawing stop motion style after work meetup. Almost till the end of the event I received a beta invite to try out DoInk.com.
Well I’ve been super busy - doing nothing - lately! so I didn’t have the time to explore or review any new sites - here is a belated review of DoInk.com.

Above is a simple animation I’ve created on DoInk. A word of warning: before save out your final animation - make sure you don’t plan to use your current browser for any other task, it pretty much freezes my FireFox {luckily Safari is a pretty good backup}. With that warned let’s get start on what the hype is all about.

1. It’s a Flash like in browser animation tool.
2. Unlike Flash you don’t need to pay … em … big bucks and study like hell to know how to use the program, DoInk is pretty easy and simple to understand.
3. undo undo undo - MAC users, meet Control Z, oh what a pain - I find myself yelling out ‘oh crap’ and pressing Command Z repeatedly.
4. Might be just me but no left right arrow controls to go through the frames?!!! I’m lazy :p
5. if you like to draw you will like DoInk, might take sometime to get a hold of the tools, would help alot if you are drawing with a tablet.
6. clean interface … sometimes too bare, after spending some time saving, I’m back to the starting page, no congrats message, no what to do next hint, just a page for me {it just might be that i’m slow} to figure out.
7. Some actions aren’t that clearly marked, user created videos are marked with a link ’share’ , after some stumbling around I finally figured out to embed my video to my blog I need to click on share … again I’m just slow, but to me share sounds like i’m sharing my video on the site … like some sites has private or public actions.
8. drag clips onto the time frame sometimes creates two of the same clips playing back to back, there’s no way to select just one and deleted so the best bet is to X all then re-drag
9. After all it is still in Alpha, all in all it’s a pretty solid piece of web animation tool :) I like it alot.
10 . I love the video player, it’s not bulky like Youtube, DoInk’s embedded video player is pretty light and sleek, I like it alot. — tho, the ‘PAUSE’ button doesn’t work.

Check it for yourself DoInk.com

Popularity: 28% [?]