Little Miss Phone Wallpapers

Way back when my fiancé got her first smartphone I created a custom background wallpaper for her. It was an original Motorola Droid and she had a pink case on it. I created “Little Miss Droid” which was inspired by the Little Miss and Mr. Men books.

When it came time to power down her Droid for the last time and move to her brand-spanking-new iPhone, she was a little sad to see Little Miss Droid leave her life. She named her iPhone “Little Miss iPhone” and I knew she would love it if I made a new wallpaper for her. I finally finished it this past weekend and I’m really happy with how it turned out. There isn’t a “Mr. iPhone” for myself yet, but that is definitely on my to-do list.

Little Miss wallpapers on the phones

 

Instagram Goodies: Physical Photos

Last time I posted about Instagram I shared some web viewers to explore the Instagram world on your computer. Now I’d like to share a few sites that let you take your photos out of the cloud and into the world. Many of these will give you physical prints of your photos but each one has its own unique spin.

Instaprint: This is a really cool idea. They’ve created a system for printing Instagrams at events. You set it up with a hashtag and location, then all photos matching either of those will be printed out of a small little box. It’s super simple but infinitely cool. Your photos are also saved to an online gallery so you can view all the event’s photos in one place. They rent out their boxes for events but I hope they will be selling them soon. I’d love to own one.

Printstagram: As you probably guessed by the name, Printstagram prints your Instagrams. They have a variety of products from t-shirts to a mini prints, posters to stickers and my personal favorite, tiny books. There are lots of options to bring your favorite Instagrams to the physical world.

StickyGram: This site lets you pick 9 of your favorite photos and turns them into a 3×3 grid of magnets. It’s a great way to spice up your fridge with photos you’ve taken. My fiancé made one with pictures from her and her mom’s trip to Paris. They’re really great keepsakes.

Postagram: This one is actually a smart phone app available on both Android and iOS. I’ve used it and it’s a neat, easy way to send a postcard to someone with one of your Instagram photos. You can put a custom message on it and they take care of the dirty work of printing and mailing it off. All you do is a few taps on the phone and a buck or two later, it’s done. I think they’re even giving you 5 free cards right now, so go check it out!

CanvasPop: This service will enlarge and print your photos onto canvas. They literally turn your Instagrams into pieces of art, how cool is that? I plan on trying this one out soon myself.

Disc Golf (My New Favorite Thing)

disc golf discs on a picnic table

This week I started playing disc golf. It’s amazing. I’ve fallen completely in love with it. It’s laid back and gets you out in nature with your friends. It doesn’t take forever to play like real golf and it’s certainly much cheaper. I always thought it sounded cool but for some reason I never managed to play until this week. I played three times in the first four days of my disc golf career. I can’t get enough of it.

Of course one of the first things I did was find an app and some websites to help learn the game and keep track of my stats. I’ve found Disc Golf Course Review to be absolutely indispensable. They’ve got a huge database of courses with loads of info on each and many with reviews. You can really get an idea of what to expect and where to find courses near you.

You can’t talk about disc golf without mentioning the Professional Disc Golf Association. They have a lot of great resources on their website too. You don’t have to be an official member to get access to them all either, which is very nice of them for us n00bs.

My Disc Golf Profile at Discasaurus - Mobile Disc Golf Scoring Application for iPhoneMy favorite find has to be Discasaurus. After searching around the web and reading reviews in the App Store, Discasaurus seemed like one of the best iPhone apps to keep score of your games. It has nice graphics and an easy to use interface, it syncs back to their website and best of all, it’s free. I think it’s a really cool app and community. I like being able to look back at my scores and this makes it easy while giving me a great way to actually record those scores on the course.

If you haven’t tried disc golf yet, you should. It’s not hard to get started and even if you aren’t an expert, it can be a lot of fun just to be outside for a while. If you’re a seasoned veteran I’m sure you have your own favorite resources. What are they? Did I miss your favorite? Tell me about it in the comments.

Christopher Jones throwing a disc at a disc golf tee in the woods

Instagram Goodies: Web Viewers

Today is the one year anniversary of my first Instagram photo. I thought I would share some fun Instagram goodies with you in honor of that. Instagram is a hugely popular, fun and quirky photo sharing app that you’ve probably heard of by now. Its “hipster” filters and easy sharing to just about any service imaginable, make it a go-to when you want the world to see what you’re up to. Here’s my first Instagram, taken in the little hotel Abby and I lived in while interning in Switzerland.

Many people would say the biggest fault of Instagram is its lack of a web interface. You can click-through to see the photo but there’s no website to browse your history or popular photos. All of this is done in the app. That has meant there are many Instagram viewers popping up around the web. Here are a few of my favorites:

Pinstagram: Claiming to be “the best way to view Instagram on the web,” Pinstagram combines the jQuery Masonry layout (made popular by Pinterest) with your feed from Instagram. It’s a very clean, fast and easy to use interface. You can view your feed, popular photos, nearby photos, search for a tag and even see your likes. I think it’s one of the best web viewers out there. I’m especially impressed with the speed, some of the other viewers can feel very laggy at times.

Statigram: While Statigram does have a viewer and you can search by tags, I think it’s most useful for the stats. They serve up various analytics about your Instagram account and compile it into easy to read and fun-looking infographics. You can even set up reports to be run at certain intervals and emailed to you.

Followgram: This is a very simple viewer that gives you a unique URL to share with others. You can see my Followgram vanity page to get an idea. That’s the biggest difference with this one. Otherwise it has many of the same functions as the others.

Instagrid: Instagrid is along the same lines as Followgram, giving you a unique URL to share (here’s mine) but the user interface is a little cleaner and more responsive. It doesn’t have any extras like tag searching or popular photos. This is just a feed of your personal photos.

Webstagram: If you’re looking for something a little more complete, Webstagram might be for you. This one has your feed, search and popular feed but adds an extra layer on top. You can click-through photos to get a page that lets you post comments and share to various services. It’s a good concept but I think it’s poorly implemented and the user interface leaves a lot to be desired.

There are other web viewers out there but these are a decent sample. After a while they all start to look the same with similar feature sets. Try out a few and see which one is right for you. They’re all free and easy to sign up for with you Instagram account so don’t be afraid to try them all. Did I miss your favorite? Be sure to tell me about it in the comments.

Pebble E-Paper Watch

A while back the Pebble made a splash in the tech world. I was impressed by it and its capabilities. I set the link aside to further investigate later. Every once in a while I’d see it tweeted about or mentioned on a tech site and then earlier this week I finally sat down and watched all the video and read through all the descriptions. I then decided I had to have one.


A little background… Not long ago my first generation iPod nano was replaced (via recall) with a current generation nano. I thought it was really cool and immediately got a watchband case for it. I wore it around a few days and while it looked cool it wasn’t practical. I had to keep turning on the screen to see the time and why would I use it for music when I’m already carrying around my iPhone? I stopped wearing it. I wondered why it couldn’t communicate with my iPhone, why caller ID and emails couldn’t be transmitted to my wrist. The technology is all there, it’s just not implemented. Enter the Pebble.

This isn’t the first watch to link to your phone with bluetooth but it’s the most well thought out one I’ve seen. It looks nice, it has loads of customization and it works with both iOS and Android. Out of the box it will have many useful features like music controls and caller ID. There’s going to be an online store for additional apps to download to your watch via your phone. They’re making it easy for developers to access their SDK and by including both iOS and Android devices, I think lots of developers will hop on board.

The Pebble seems like the watch I’ve been waiting for. A few days ago I made the decision to pledge support on Pebble’s Kickstarter page. I was about to plop down the cash for my “pre-order” (They ship in September by the way) but realized if I got 5 friends together we could each save a bit of money and have our choice of colors. I started campaigning among my circle of friends and had just about everyone ready to go. Yesterday I found out they are all sold out. EVERY level of support is gone. I’m really upset with myself for not acting sooner. I’m still really looking forward to the Pebble and I hope it’s extremely successful. I’m not looking forward to paying full retail (estimated to be $150+) because I missed out on the Kickstarter project. I guess” you snooze you lose” really holds true here.

Anniversary of my Great Swiss Adventure

At this time a year ago I was packed and on my way to the adventure of a lifetime. I was taking my first overseas trip to join my fiance and start a three-month long internship at ICON Worldwide. I can’t believe it’s already been a year. It also happened to be Mother’s Day and my family came over to Kalamazoo to send me off (and thankfully drive me to a shuttle bus in Indiana headed for O’Hare).

I remember being slightly sick and extremely busy the couple of weeks beforehand. I was trying to finish up projects and pack and prepare frantically before my May 8 deadline. But it was here now and all that stood in the way of Switzerland was two planes and a train.

I finally finished the longest leg of the trip to Amsterdam and by that point had lost all sense of what time it was or even what day it was. From Schiphol I took a comparatively tiny flight over to Zurich (apparently I missed that check-in) and then nervously hopped a train to St. Gallen. I say nervously because I was so tired and very worried I was going to get on the wrong train.

The whole experience in Switzerland was surreal. I sometimes think it was all an elaborate dream, especially when I look back at pictures of the beautiful mountains and surroundings. I’m going to make another post that goes into details about some of my experiences in Europe and at the internship but for now, enjoy these scenes of Switzerland.

World’s Longest Invoice

I’ve been a frequent freelancer since high school (so about a decade, I’m starting to feel old). For many designers and developers this is their only form of work. It’s a stressful endeavor and there are lots of pitfalls to be had. One of the worst is not getting paid. For some reason or another you’ll come across a client who doesn’t want to pay for the services you’ve provided. Perhaps they aren’t completely satisfied with your work or they don’t think it’s worth what you billed them. I’ve had clients who just disappear or change management midway through a project. It’s always good practice to get a contract before starting work (unfortunately many of us learn this the hard way) but even with a contract it’s hard to make an unwilling client pay.

Enter The World’s Longest Client List. Basically it’s a call to all freelancers who have ever been burned on a job. They encourage you to add up everything you’ve ever been cheated out of by non-paying clients and add it to their list. While it’s not going to get you those lost wages, the movement is getting a fair bit of media. It’s drawing attention to a serious problem and hopefully that will help going forward.

Freelancing is a tough gig with no real stability or job security. If you’re a client, do the right thing and pay your bills. You wouldn’t stiff your plumber, why would you do that to your designer? If you’re a designer, do all that you can to protect yourself. Get a simple contract signed by both parties BEFORE work starts. I like to have them pay a deposit (usually 30–50% is good) upfront. That way even if they disappear or never pay the final invoice, I’m not entirely screwed. You can also try refusing to hand over the final files or project until they’ve paid in full. If you have the contract you’ll be able to take them to court if necessary. Sometimes just the threat of getting a lawyer involved will be enough to make them pay up.

Good luck to all of you freelancers out there and if you have been screwed, be sure to add your lost wages to The World’s Longest Client List.

App Review: Clear for iPhone

You probably have heard about Clear, the to-do list app that made a big splash a couple of months ago with its extremely simple and unique interface. It truly is an app that thinks outside the box when it comes to user experience. I immediately downloaded it because the interface was just so different and intriguing I had to touch it. I played with it for a while, added some tasks and lists, deleted some, changed themes and thoroughly enjoyed the quirky little app. Clear is great. It’s ground-breaking even. It totally re-imagines user interactions. That’s all well and fine but is it useful?

Some would say Clear’s lack of fancy bells and whistles is what makes it great. There aren’t any buttons and you add, delete and re-arrange with swipes and gestures. This part really works well and I think it’s an improvement over other list apps I’ve used. To fully appreciate the UI, you really need to use it but this video does a good job walking through it.

The simplicity that makes it great is also what makes it so frustrating. If you want to view your list on a computer, you’re out of luck. Clear doesn’t synch up with any of your beloved services. You won’t find any iCloud or Google here. I assume they feel everyone has their iPhone with them all the time. While that is true (for me at least) I also am at my computer the majority of the day and would love to have my iCal or Google Calendar to effortlessly synch my tasks from Clear. Sometimes it’s easier to manage these tasks on the device I’m using and not have to pull out my phone and open an app just to check an item off my list. I don’t think this is necessarily a deal-breaker but it’s certainly annoying.

The biggest downfall of Clear is its lack of dates. You can create a task for anything but you can’t assign a due date to it. Sometimes it’s really nice to know a bill is due on such-and-such date so you make sure it’s in the mail on time. I would like these date-assigned tasks to show up in my calendar so when I’m looking at what’s going on today, I can see a task that needs to get done too. Again, this begs the question, “how simple is too simple?”

Visually, Clear isn’t much to look at (but in a good way). It’s basically just rectangles of tasks. That’s pretty much all it needs to be. They offer a variety of themes that change those rectangle’s colors. You can earn “bonus” themes by having other apps (for example, Path) and games installed or following team members on twitter. I’ve even read that completing 100 tasks unlocks a theme. That’s a nice little Easter egg. It would probably be nice if you could design your own themes. It probably wouldn’t be hard to allow you to pick your own set of colors, but that complicates the app and goes against the simplicity they’re going for.

Screen shots of the Clear app

Overall I like Clear. I still use it but to-do lists for me always seem like such a great idea until I forget about them. Clear is fun and useful. I’m making an effort to remember to use it everyday. I wish it had a few more features to it (perhaps due dates with alerts could remind me to use it more) but its unique interface is very refreshing and might just make up for its lack of features.

You can check out Clear in the App Store.

Living in the Cloud

With the recent release of Google Drive, “the cloud” is once again all anyone can talk about. There are plenty of options but now that the big boys like Apple and Google are on board, just about everyone is starting to use some form of cloud storage.

I’m personally a huge fan of the cloud. I love having access to stuff anywhere, anytime and on any device. I actually use multiple services to maximize free space (and because I’m a little too paranoid about my data to put all my eggs in the same basket). Here are a few popular cloud services I’ve tried out:

Dropbox – I started using Dropbox a few years back at an independent contracting gig. It was a really simple way to transfer files between my laptop and the office desktop I was using. It was even more useful to have a shared folder with other team members so any of us could get access to the latest files at any time. Since leaving that job, I still use Dropbox all the time. It’s simple enough that I really don’t have to do anything at all. I love that it works across so many platforms so effortlessly. There’s been multiple times where I’ve needed a file when I wasn’t near my computer and could still get to it with someone else’s computer through the Dropbox website (This isn’t just a feature of Dropbox but most of the cloud services). When you sign up for your free account you get a decent chunk of space (2GB) and you can earn more space with referrals (up to 16GB total). There are paid accounts that up your storage space considerably, but I haven’t reached a point where that’s necessary yet. I think they also have “team” packages with lots of space designed for sharing on a project or in an office.

CX – This one is almost completely a clone of Dropbox (I’m not sure which came first, maybe Dropbox is the clone). They have the same effortless synching between devices and  CX works across plenty of platforms too. What I do like is their style. It’s bright, it’s fun and it’s very clean. The other big advantage to CX is the space. You start with 10GB, which is the largest free amount I’ve come across. You can even earn up to another 6GB by referring friends. If you’re looking for space, you can’t beat CX.

Google Drive – Google finally rolled out the much-rumored Google Drive. It essentially upgrades Google Docs to 5GB that you can use to store all of your files on. They’re accessible online (compatible formats can still be opened/edited like old Docs) and there is a nice desktop app that behaves (as in effortlessly synching) exactly like Dropbox and CX. There’s an Android app that I haven’t tested and apparently an iOS app is in the works. I’ve been an avid user of Google Docs for a while now so Google Drive is a nice upgrade for me. Google has a bit of an edge with integration. They’ve already announced a few partnerships (Lulu for example) and a number of browser plugins to extend it. I think done right, they can grab a lot of market share with tie-ups like these.

iCloud – This is Apple’s take on the cloud. Like many things Apple does, they don’t want you to even realize it’s there. They want to give you what you want when you want it without having to worry about where it lives. I haven’t come across many apps that are integrating with it yet but I’m sure they are coming. All of my iPhone pics are automatically available via photo stream in my iPhoto when I pop open the laptop. It’s stupid simple and for that I have to recommend it. Your mail, contacts, calendars, bookmarks (for Safari), photos, docs and even iPhone backups work without you having to do anything (beyond enabling it). As an added bonus they’ve added “find my Mac/iPhone” into the mix so you can locate your misplaced device. The downside is your synching is mostly limited to Apple products and services. If you’re using any of those though, it totally rocks.

Cloud App – This one is very different from the rest. It’s something I use nearly everyday but not in the same way. Basically it’s a service to share files. You just drop a file on the little cloud icon in your menu bar (on a Mac at least), it uploads and generates a tiny URL for you to share. You can even have it auto upload screen captures (again, on my Mac at least). One of the really cool features of the app is “rain drops.” These are essentially plugins that extend the usefulness of Cloud App to other apps. My favorite mail client, Sparrow, also integrates with Cloud App for sending attachments. I couldn’t find a definite total space limit on Cloud App’s site but you are limited to 10 files a day at up to 25MB a file. For most things that’s perfectly acceptable. They’ve got pro plans that up that space and add other cool features like custom domains for sharing. This isn’t something that will replace your Dropbox but I use both everyday for very different work flows.

Those are just a few options that I’ve personally been using. Each one is a little bit different and for me at least, no one service can do it all. I like each for specific reasons and will continue to use them all. Since you can try them all for free, I suggest you do and find what works best for you. Do you have a favorite I didn’t mention? Tell me about it in the comments.

Designing a Wedding Part 2

If you haven’t seen Designing a Wedding Part 1, I went over how we got started with our invitations. After that design hurdle was jumped, we moved on to our website. Wedding websites are all over the place these days and there are plenty of free templates to get you started. Because we already established a very unique look (compared to a traditional wedding at least) we opted to design our site from the ground up.

abbyandchristopher.com homepage

We started with a splash or welcome page. It very closely resembles our invitation design but with more simplified information. We added our links to bottom to allow our visitors to get to the more specific information they’re looking for.

Our Story webpage

We tried to keep it simple and had only five links. We did one for our story which gives a little background on how we met and how our relationship developed. There’s a page for the locations of our venues with convenient links to maps and directions on how to get there. An accommodation section lists nearby hotels. We decided that an online RSVP form would be more convenient for guests and us (a win-win you might say). The back-end of that is powered by Google Forms. I was able to completely customize the look, which I discussed in this earlier post. Finally, we added a page with links to our gift registries.

locations page of our wedding website

The “secondary” pages all have the same design. They use the top from our invitations and homepage and turn it into a unifying header. The links turn into a simple menu to the left to allow visitors to navigate from page to page very easily.

The whole design is very simple and compliments our invitations very nicely. The invitation directs recipients to the site so we thought it was important to give a unified experience. While it’s not massive or even very complicated, I think it turned out to be a nice little site with all the relevant information easily accessible.

We haven’t made it this far but I do hope to incorporate the designs into our program and thank you notes. As those progress I’ll throw up another post about them. I always think it’s fun to see a whole design package and how all the pieces fit together and this particular project has been extra special for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at our wedding design process.