I heart Australia-based company, Plasq. In early 2006, when my honey bunny brought home his latest MacBook Pro, I fell in love with a little program called “Comic Life”. Sleek, stunning and an amazingly easy program to navigate, I spent hours dragging photos into the application to create my own graphic novel. I’m no David Mack but I’d like to think what I lack in artistic ability, I make up for in cruelty.

Image created in Plasq’s Comic Life
In the graphic novel of my life, my passive aggressive mother received a pair of bloody fangs. My father became a chubby and lethargic ninja, and for the pièce de résistance, my brother’s part was played by the hind quarters of a cow. Ah yes. Comic Life allows the user to torment and torture its unsuspecting prey in a variety of ways. Given the endless fodder of Facebook photos, it’s becoming exceedingly easy to instill comedic effect in even the most stoic old grouches. Customize your custom’s agent, tax the tax man’s nerves or wreak havoc on the high school bully you never confronted. If you can imagine it, you can do it.

ENTER DOOZLA
Plasq’s latest effort Doozla launched at this week’s MacWorld Expo in SF’s Moscone Center. While the majority of media attention was focussed on the new $1800 MacBook Air,  Doozla proves itself a sweet little program with a sweet little price tag. For $24.95 your kids can draw and paint on blank pages, background scenes, coloring book pages and their own web cam images. This application is extremely intuitive and is a great triumph in user design. With translated versions, or even with the sound off, this product would be an amazing addition to the laptop project’s OLPC given its use of icon-based prompts and instructions.