After I saw Michael Arringtons post on “Animoto On the iPhone“, I had a little play with both the iPhone app and their website. I’m impressed. It solves a problem I’ve had for a while – how do I make quick and dirty slideshows from my photos? Well, with it’s flickr/Facebook/SmigMig/Picasa/photobucket integration, as well as the ability to upload photos and music from your computer, it took me <1minute to get my first 30s video working. Take a look here:
I’m liking it, in fact I’ve just bought an “all-access-pass” which will let me create and download longer videos.
Brightkite is a geosocial network. Based loosely on twitter-style short messages, but with a much stronger leaning towards location awareness.
I’ve used both the standard Brightkite website and also their iPhone optimized site for many months. There are three things I really like about Brightkite. Firstly, they’ve done a great job in making the application agnostic. I don’t care if I’m accessing Brightkite via Safari on my Mac in my office, using the iPhone optimized site or now, the native iPhone application (link to the iTunes store). While obviously the look is slightly different, the feel is alway the same.
Secondly, Brightkite is great at getting my location. When access from a desktop or notebook computer, Brightkite will do a pretty good job at guessing your location either by using the Loki plugin, or Mozilla Geode (more here and here). When using your iPhone, Brightkite will use CoreLocation to discover your location. I like the way the iPhone native application will sort your placemarks by what it thinks is nearest to your estimated location. When the estimated location isn’t quite right, you can “pick a place”, by searching for your actual location. It’s nice that locations are named, rather than just co-ordinates, it’s a nice human-friendly touch.
Lastly, the balance between openness and privacy is ideal, and customizable. For example, if I want to make my exact location known or hidden, or obfuscated (Brightkite calls this “City” and is really just your location generalized to a larger area), a simple switch lets me do this. I can also set privacy levels for different categories of contacts, including trusted friends, friends and everyone else.
This aspect makes it ideal for meeting fellow Brightkite users in real-world social gatherings. Use Brightkite to see who’s nearby and send them a message!
In fact, it’s how I met Brightkite founder Martin May, at a recent Tech Cocktail event in Boulder.
Of course, Brightkite lets you stream your consciousness a’la most other social networks, via a simple URL:
This will take you to my stream of checkins, photos and notes.
It can also stream directly to twitter, and meta-update services like ping.fm support updating Brightkite. Links to services like Facebook, Flickr and Linked-In are available via your profile page.
Here’s a video demo of the Brightkite iPhone app in action.
UMapper makes it easy to embed Flash-based maps in your website, blog or popular social networks. If you quickly need to create and share a one-off map for almost any purpose, UMapper is a great way to do it.
UMapper home page
I like UMapper as both a technologist and as a traveler. It has one of the easiest interfaces I’ve used; I created and embedded my first map within 3 minutes.
WIth the ability to choose from map providers Google, Microsoft and OpenStreetMap, and the ability to embed maps easily into Facebook, MySpace, Blogger blogs, Wordpress (hosted) blogs, Orkut and iGoogle – as well as providing a Wordpress plug-in, there is enormous flexibility and ease of use.
There’s also the ability to add custom markers, polygons, circles and lines, making it useful for a whole set of businesses from mining companies to real-estate agents.
Import options supported include KML, GPX, and GeoRSS.
The traveler in me really liked twbr’s map, outlining his route through Africa.
I’ve been liking Jott, a great voice to text recognition service. It’s proven to be accurate and reasonably fast – ideal for taking quick notes on the go.
I’ve also been playing with Evernote over the past week, touting itself as “remember everything” – or what I like even better, “capture, sync, find”. It’s just out of closed beta, so now anyone can sign up.
Now, Jott is great at capturing data and Evernote is pretty good at organizing it. I was wondering if I could combine the two, and I came across this great Lifehacker article explaining just how to do that.
A great combination, which is worth keeping a close eye on.
I have loads of hotel, airline and other membership cards. In fact, I don’t have a wallet big enough for them all so they sit in a drawer at home. I used to have a list of the numbers somewhere, but it quickly became out of date.
One thing I do have with me 95% of the time is my iPhone. And now, as I’ve scanned all my cards and put them in a gallery in Aperture and sync’ed with my iPhone, I have all my cards with me when I need them!
The only two issues I see are, 1, don’t just credit cards, drivers licence, etc. as your phone may be lost/stolen, and 2, it’s difficult to swipe the mag stripe!
It’s certainly good enough to use on the road, when time is a premium, but the way it manages media is a bit of a pain. I really want Aperture integration, which lead me to try ecto. I also need to host my own image files, as I found that flickr is blocked in Iran and other countries (although there is a workaround for Firefox users, which I’ve used and recommend), and Ovi blocks access geographically from certain IP address ranges.
So far, so good. It lets me upload images directly to my site, easily embed thumbnails thus;
and has the other features you would expect (html editor, easy linking, good tag and category support, etc.)
I’ll try it for a few more days and see how it goes.
I’ve decided to start using flickr again as I like how easy it makes blogging. For our travel blog, our workflow is based on Aperture and MarsEdit which in turn upload to both flickr and our WordPress blogs. I’m using flickrexport to get my images out of Aperture.
Here’s a picture of one of my trucks by way of a test.
I’m going to have to remember that the pictures cannot be more than 400px wide given the two column layout in my current template. In MarsEdit, I’ll have to use the “small” size for images.
Today I’ve done the lions-share of the work to upgrade my 3 blogs. Now, I’m not really sure why I have 3 blogs, other than it helps my different personas log their thoughts in appropriate places. The 3 blogs are:
I’ve kept a similar look and feel across all 3, I host them all on Media Temple, which offers a great virtualized service. I’m running Wordpress 2.5 with a mysql backend.
As we’re off traveling again soon (follow our progress on blog.exerro.com), I’ve also started using Marsedit, to allow us both to blog offline and upload text and images whenever we can connect to a ropey internet connection!
