Allow me to introduce SOGG, a Simple Online Graphic Generator.
SOGG allows you to easily create simple yet attractive graphics for different purposes: a ‘feature graphic’ for your Android application, an image for your post on Facebook or LinkedIn, etc.
Sample image generated with SOGG
Wait a second…
“An online tool to create an Android feature graphic”… Haven’t we seen this before? Probably! SOGG is the third incarnation of one of my side projects.
Screenshot of version 1
The initial version was called “Android Feature Graphic Generator” and focused on drawing simple Android-specific graphics needed to publish an Android app in the Play Store: a feature graphic, a promo graphic or a TV banner. It was quickly written in pure JavaScript resulting in code that was really hard to maintain or extend. Ugly but it got the job done.
Screenshot of version 2
The second version had a more general name: “Online Graphic Generator”. It had more predefined graphic sizes (e.g. for social media posts) and supported multiple layers. These new features were possible because everything was rewritten in Kotlin/JS with KVision as the UI layer.
When JetBrains made Kotlin multiplatform and added support for Android’s new UI framework Compose on the web, I started thinking of building a new version.
So, SOGG was born.
SOGG is written from scratch in Kotlin Multiplatform.
The UI is built using Compose with some excellent UI components from the Composables UI library.
The backend uses a Ktor server.
Screenshot of SOGG
So, what’s new?
Compose made it much easier to add new features like:
- Support for rotating text and images
- Support for tinting images
- Support for zooming in/out
- Support for dark theme
- Support for keyboard shortcuts
I plan to add more features in the future, but I do want to make sure that the tool remains easy to use. I have no plans to turn this into a full-blown image editing tool. The “simple” in the name is there for a reason.
What’s up with the payments?
Earlier versions of the graphic generator were 100% free. You were free to draw as many graphics as you wanted, and you were free to download them as PNG files, without any restrictions.
Over the years multiple users have suggested that I should create a paid version in order to support the ongoing development. At the same time I had noticed that there was a small number of users who used the tool a lot, like hundreds of PNG downloads per month.
I have decided to make SOGG freemium. with the following properties:
- You are free to design as many graphics as you want, using all drawing tools available.
- In order to download your graphic as a PNG image file, you need to register. After registration, you receive five download credits.
- Each time you download a PNG image of your graphic, one download credit is consumed.
- Additional download credits are available for purchase.
The free download credits should be sufficient for the majority of users. If you do more than creating a one-off image, you can purchase download credits.