Most great inventions come from necessity. I’m not saying our web app SuperLame is anywhere near as important as say, the microwave or I don’t know, energy drinks, but it has it’s place. About a year ago I thought to myself, self, there’s not anywhere on the internet to go to quickly and easily add comic word balloons to photos. Yeah, it’s not a revolutionary idea, but if you search the tubes for an app like I’ve just described you’d be hard pressed to find anything as fast, easy, or quality as Superlame.com.

Who, What, When, Where, Why, How?

OK, so SuperLame was an internal project done by us, BeOriginal. We funded and created the site and continue to support it. What is it? Well, I was about to tell you. SuperLame is simply an online web tool/app for anyone to upload a photo, add comic balloons, then save that photo to use for whatever. That’s it, simple right? When did all this nonsense start? Well, I was hanging a picture above my toilet when I fell and hit my head, the next thing I remember was waking up and building the flux capacitor, wait… no, sorry, different story. So, from idea to working beta, because it’s not web 2.0 if it’s not beta, the app and site took around eight (8) days to develop. Since then we’ve continued to update and improve the site, adding such features as comic style sound effects “Whoopa!”. As for the where… well that’s kind of stupid, I’ll just say, the internet. Why? I kind of already covered that in the first paragraph. Basically, whether there was a need or not, I saw one and wanted to do something about it, if for no other reason than to just do it. Now we get to the meaty stuff, the how. Simple answer, computers.

More On How We Did It

Yeah computers were involved, but computers don’t do squat without fingers to mash keys and a brain to tell those fingers what keys to mash. I forgot what I was saying. Anyway, the main SuperLame application was built in Adobe Flash using Actionscript 3. If you know what that is great, if not, it’s basically the tech on the web that let’s you watch all those stupid lip syncing videos on YouTube. Flash allows the creation of very feature rich and interactive web applications and web sites, and that’s why we used it. With that said, while Flash played a large role in the user experience and front end of the application, PHP, another very popular and useful web language played a pivotal role behind the scenes. PHP stands for… well, I’m not exactly sure, in fact I don’t think the first P stands for anything. Hold on, let me “wiki” it… OK, yep the first P is stupid, but the rest supposedly stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. Guess it should technically be HPP, but that just doesn’t roll of the tongue the same way. <sarcasm>Anyway, I’m sure that helps you understand it better.</sarcasm> Oh, and if you didn’t get that last joke, the one with the <tag> stuff, it’s just stupid web developer “humor”, I’m sorry. And on that note, I think I’ll wrap this up before I go even farther off course.

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