The Finger is a novelty app created by the makers of Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally. The purpose of this application is to formulate unique animations using hundreds of different hand gestures. Along with being funny, this app is also useful to the hearing impaired.

Upon startup, three choices are given. “Pose” lets you create your own unique hand gesture by moving around joints on a replica of a human hand. “Animate” lets you take gestures that you have created, or one of the many included, and piece them together into an animation. “Quick Play” enables you to play the last animation you were working on.

The pose feature is nice to have due to the limited amount of gestures included. It works pretty well, although I did experience a few mis-taps. You are given the option to save your creation with your own custom name, and it is added to the “custom” option in the animation mode.

Most of your time will be spent in the animation mode. The top of the screen displays several different categories, such as “attacks” and “pointing.” Once you’ve selected your desired gesture, drag it to the timeline on the right hand side to piece together your animation. Upon clicking the starting point or ending point of the timeline, you are presented with several options, such as transition time, transition type, and delay.

Although it sounds like all fun and games, this app actually serves a very useful purpose. In animation mode, the bottom control panel contains everything you would expect, like save and clear, but it also includes a button for American Sign Language. All you do is type in your message and select your desired speed, and the words are acted out through sign language. This can be very useful to anyone who does not know sign language and needs to communicate with someone who is hearing impaired.

Unless you need to communicate through sign language without actually learning it, I cannot recommend this app. It has an easy-to-use interface, quite a few options, and easy-to- use controls, but it isn’t very useful to most. You can always just type a message and have the hearing impaired individual read it. It was entertaining for the first little while, but now it’s just taking up space on my device. I’d pass on this one.