The Friday Five Good Things

Five good things that happened this week.

1. Made it to Town Hall from an appointment in Wellesley before noon (Town Hall closes at noon on Fridays) to pay the taxes.

2. I "met" my fifth cousin on my father's side of the family through Ancestry.com

3. I'm enjoying the Bodleian Library's coloring book and the #surelysimplelettering fill-in challenge prompts on Instagram.

4. Found a free app, iWatermark, to add a watermark to photographs on the camera roll. Giving it a try before buying the app. So far, so good.

5. Passed the pizza dough recipe to The Eldest, and we made pizza together.

How was your week?

Instagram

A friend told me I should sign up for an Instagram account. Instagram is a picture and video social media sharing site using your smartphone. She said there were a lot of art challenges and contests that I might like.

Bored while watching it snow on Saturday, I signed up for an account. My first pic to upload was a storm picture.  Instagram then suggested people for me to follow.

I'm still trying to figure the ins and outs of the app. The app allows you to edit your images though what you can do with them seems quite limited to me. Maybe I just haven't figured it all out yet.

I'm also not sure of Instagram etiquette.  How often should you spam share pictures with your followers? Once or twice a day? Once or twice an hour? (-;

You can leave comments or click a heart to like someone's pictures. With Twitter you can retweet, and with Facebook you can share, but there doesn't seem to me to be a way to share Instagram content  with  friends. Maybe I haven't figured that out, either.

My website promotes my calligraphy services. Twitter does, too, to a certain extent. I can show my work on the blog. I can also whine, review tools, software and services which hopefully will show more of me beyond calligraphy. I use Tumblr as an electronic portfolio. But I'm not sure how Instagram goes beyond the social media I already use.  The people I'm following and who are following me back already see my stuff on the other social media sites.

I'm also more of a computer person than an app person. Call me old(-fashioned). I'd prefer to edit my photos on the computer and upload them to a site. I can tweet, Facebook, and Tumblr all from the comfort of my computer keyboard. That doesn't seem possible with Instagram.

So, the jury's still out as to Instagram's value for me. Perhaps I just need more time to figure it out.

If you're on Instagram and need another follower, you can find me at cjkennedyink. And if you want to let me know what I'm missing, that would be great, too.

Tools, Gadgets, and Widgets - Key Ring

I'm not one for shopping in stores especially if I have to produce a frequent shopper card to get specials or discounts. (Personally, I think all shoppers who visit a store are entitled to all promotions whether they frequent the store or run in for a quick errand). The worst part is carrying around all those cards, and then fumbling at the register to find the right card.

If you have a smartphone, you can easily download and carry all your shopping cards without fear of bursting your wallet. Key Ring is a free app for iPhone and Android users. Using your app, scan all your shopping cards. They are now located all in one spot, all specials are automatically loaded onto the card. While waiting in line at the register, simply call up the app, find the card and show it to the cashier. The cashier can use the hand scanner to record your purchases for marketing. The cashier can also manually key your shopping number, if the hand scanner doesn't work.  Key Ring is a win-win for all. Marketing can track your purchases, and you won't suffer muscle strain carrying around all your cards.

Tools, Gadgets, and Widgets - AppGuppy

Scan the QR Code with your smartphone to download my app

Have you ever been out and about your day away from your computer? Did you ever wish, "Gee, I wonder what CJ blogged about or tweeted today?" Well, wonder no more. There's an app for that. And you can make your own app, too!

I found out about AppGuppy from ArtsyShark. And you know me and widgets, I just had to play.

AppGuppy is an easy and free way to create a mobile app to promote your business or yourself. You don't need to know any fancy programming and in five minutes you'll have your own app. AppGuppy steps you through the process. There are several templates to choose from. Customize the content from your social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr. You can test the app using your browser or phone. When you're happy with how it looks, AppGuppy generates a QR Code and a URL so you can easily share your app with all your friends.  Go to http://CJKennedy.appguppy.com from your browser and you'll be given prompts to send my app to your phone. You can go to the URL from your phone and download the app directly. You can also share you app from Facebook and Twitter.

My app tabs include an RSS feed for my blog and Twitter (because I wouldn't want you to miss the scintillating things I blog or tweet about), Tumblr (I'll be uploading some of my work to be used as an electronic portfolio), a tab with my teaching schedule, and how to contact me. Wicked cool!

The app is very easy to use and tech support is just an email away. Excellent tech support, btw. There's a small bug with my About Page on Facebook, and my email was answered quickly to help resolve the problem.

So what are you waiting for? Go make your app! Don't forget to share it with me.

Tools, Gadgets, and Widgets: Marble Cam

Before

I'm not a huge shutterbug. Half the time, I forget to take a picture of the interesting or mundane things going on around me. I do like playing with the photos that I take. Usually, I manipulate things in Paint Shop Pro, a poor man's version of Photoshop.

After

Last week, I found a fun app for iPhone called Marble Cam. Marble Cam makes it looks as if you've take your photograph through a glass marble. You can use the app to alter photographs in your albums or photo stream or use the camera function to capture an image.
While in the sun room last week, I was mesmerized by the sun light through the trees. Grabbed the iPhone and snapped the picture. Not a great shot especially since I shot it through the sun room screen. The translation was lost in the exposure. Marble Cam took my lack lustre photo and made it look awesome. Just as the app promised the photo looks as if it was shot through a glass marble or one of those Victorian gazing globes.

The app is also available for Android phones as MarbleDroid.

Do you have a great app to share?

Oh, and Jan over at Creative Instigation has featured my Alphabet Sunday series as a jump start for getting your creativity running. Go take a look.

Tools, Gadgets, and Widgets - Keyring

In the register line at Michael's, I fumbled for the rewards card I thought was in my wallet. I have the Michael's app on my smartphone to get their coupons, but didn't have the loyalty card with me.

 I've often thought the marketing companies should just put a chip in our earlobe much the same way naturalists tag animals. Your wallet wouldn't bulge with all the rewards card, nor would you have to carry a giant, jailer's keyring to keep the cards on. The clerk could just scan your ear, and marketing could get all the data needed about shopping habits, and the consumer could get instant reward points and coupons. 

The register clerk scanned the coupon code from my phone and then told me I needed Keyring. Keyring is a free app for smartphones that puts all your rewards cards in one place. You scan all your rewards cards into your phone using the app. When you're out shopping, you scroll through your list, show the bar code and the clerk can scan in the code or manually enter the number. No more bulging wallets or cluttered key chains. Brilliant! And it hurts a lot less than have a chip embedded in your ear.

Tools, Gadgets, and Widgets

I am especially fond of desktop widgets. Widgets are small programs that run in the background on your computer. One widget I rely heavily on is called Due and written for Yahoo Widgets. Due is that predominately blue Venetian blind looking thing on the left of my desktop.

Blog topics, reminders for phone calls, and when to pay my bills and my dad's bills all go into the mix. The widget can be customized with type face and colors to flag up coming and overdue tasks or items. My code is blue for future items, yellow as a warning that an item is coming up soon, and red for past due.

The widget can be visible on your desktop or hidden in the Yahoo Widget dock, that block in the bottom center of my computer screen. For me, if I don't see the widget, I'm apt to forget what needs to be paid or get done, so Due is visible when I boot up my system.

Yahoo has lots of great widgets: calendars, clocks, to do lists, email notifiers, weather. The dock can be positioned along any edge of your computer screen.  One downside of the Yahoo widgets, is the dock doesn't display them neatly and uniform in size as the Vista/Windows 7 Sideshow gadgets. Some of the widgets can be quite large. Overall, they are functional and look good.

I haven't had a problem using the Yahoo Widgets written and authorized by Yahoo.  Other widgets like Due, come from third party app writers so caution should be taken before downloading and running these programs.

Tweet Cloud

For those of you who use Twitter here's an application that can be used as a happy, little time waster or a statistic of your tweets. You can generate a cloud of the words you use most frequently in your tweets. http://tweetcloud.icodeforlove.com/

You log into this application with your Twitter account name and password, You can generate a cloud for the words used in a day, week, month, 3 months, 6 months or a year. If you don't want to notify your followers about your cloud, make sure you remove the check from the notify box.

My cloud shows what I was tweeting about this past month. What words do you use most frequently?