Mondays. Such A Case Of The Mondays... Creating An App Without Breaking Your Budget

I had so many ideas this weekend of things I needed to blog about and share. Alas, I sit here with nothing coming to mind...

So two cups of coffee later I did finally remember one thing. I'm all about things that come cheap and easy. I'm also terribly afraid of commitment so monthly commitments are much easier for me to make. I work for a municipality and we really wanted an app. Want to know how much they put in the budget for us to get one???? Nope. Guess higher. Still not there. DING DING DING! $50,000!!!! Do you know what I could do with $50,000??? It actually didn't pass. So I started digging and found this.

This website will let you do a test run and not only gives you a really easy interface to create the app, but it's a monthly charge (which varies depending - I would be happy with the $39 a month plan) and they will not only submit it for you to apple but also across all platforms. So you get an app that will be available for anyone in your audience, for $39 a month! Not a bad deal.

http://mobile.conduit.com/

the only work i did to get as far as this screenshot was put in our website. not everyone gets that lucky but making it look like this takes about 10 minutes even if you don't have that kind of luck.

 

whenever i messed with it about this time last year i took ten minutes and got it to look more like this, with a handful of other features that you can access! our branding has since changed so they look considerably different!

just an easy approach at getting a mobile app out there if you want it. it is free for your users to download from what we were told. i haven't tested it as far as to know whether or not there are ads within the app but i'm still looking. they also give you easy ways to promote (including the code to put QR codes and more on your website, facebook, etc) your app and you have full access to the analytics so you can see if your $39 a month is worth it. i would imagine tying this to a visitor site would be amazing. as soon as ours goes live i will be testing it and begging and pleading with the powers that be!

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts: Bullet Points and Screenshots Are My Favorites

I know it seems like a really easy thing to figure out but I wish you knew how long it took me to figure out how to create a bullet point in photoshop. Some day, photoshop will have full text editor features. This is a REALLY simple post but I'm going to link to a GREAT resource:

• To make a bullet point in photoshop: hold option + 8 at the same time and you will get this: • which is a BEAUTIFUL sight after you've been fighting with photoshop to line up your dots with your list. Alternatively you can always just copy and paste your bullet list but that's neither here nor there. :)
• To screenshot an area of your screen (we do this ALL of the time when we are in the process of sending drafts of large graphics out to everyone for review): command + shift + 4 . We also enjoy taking screen shots of peoples faces in videos at those awkward moments, like this...

Another great use for screenshots is documenting things you see on social media. Keeps the time stamp, location, etc all in tact. We file ours in a folder. These are good things to screenshot. You know. Just in case it ever comes up again:

but go check out this guys site and notice the tabs at the top of the page. it has some amazing shortcuts i didn't know about and he's dead on with his app recommendations: http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html

Clicking Audio On Video Rendered Out Of Final Cut Pro X

i LOVE e-cards and i love this because it is so true.

thankfully i have really talented and incredibly smart friends. i continuously post questions to facebook praying someone smarter than me knows the answer faster than i can find it on google. 

my problem: clicking in my audio on my video after i rendered it out of final cut pro. the solution is below. sean hare - or "seen-har-ay" as we call him - speaks slightly above my level of understanding but i understood this. did i mention he emailed me this instead of posting it to facebook to save me the embarrassment?  he's a good friend with incredible taste in music and him and his wife are the best meal preparers i've ever seen. 

As far as the sound, make sure to check your Quicktime output settings and conversions on any of those files you are bringing into Final Cut.  It sounds somewhat like digital jitter to me that can occur when you have an audio file that is maybe 16 bit-44.1KHz and you are exporting the final output to 24bit-48KHz without doing an actual conversion on the audio.  Essentially what is happening is you are getting slight dropouts of audio information where digital information is not present or doesn't "sync" or jive with the rest of it. This can occur not only on import, but also export if you are not careful.

Another thing, make sure you are using a seperate drive for your Final Cut or Adobe scratch drive rather than the hard drive you are using to render the file to.  Problems keeping up with the buffer reading, then processing the file and writing it to disc can sometimes cause issues like this as well. 

Lastly, YouTube does employ some hefty compression to the final product so you will have some loss of information.  Usually that results in a more "thin" sound or "wispy" sounding audio.  It's harder to get around this and it's simply a product of preparing audio/video for web delivery, but having a consistent setting with all your audio files and outputs set to the same bit rate and sample depth is probably  your best start. 

I'm not really a final cut guy too much since they went to Final Cut X as I don't like the interface anymore, but maybe just double checking those audio files to ensure they are getting converted during import to your session settings will help.