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!

Photoshop: Fireworks Users Do Not Be Afraid!

I grew up using autocad as a drawing program and net fusion to build websites. Isn't that insane? And I SWEAR I'm not that old!! I eventually, in college, moved to using Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks. Some of you may have never heard of fireworks. BUT if you're a web designer before a graphic designer you know it well. I'm a web girl that eventually turned graphic. All of that being said I was TERRIFIED of photoshop. Layers freaked me out. I never learned how to properly use them in Fireworks so I always had everything in the same layer but you could choose what you wanted to work with. Not the case in photoshop but i'm here to tell you THAT IS OKAY! You will survive the transition! Layers are a beautiful thing. If you have any hint of OCD, like me, it will be your favorite photoshop feature! Looking back they are not terribly different, but driving the two programs is. The best thing I can tell you to do is either find a friend who is a Photoshop genius like my co-J or dig through adobe's tutorial videos! They are wonderful! They have an entire playlist on this page of how to get started but I love the layers video for newbies: http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-photoshop-cs6/playlist/getting-started-with-photoshop-cs6/

If you're not new to photoshop but looking for a few tricks that you may or may not know here's one that i found today that was always something i couldn't figure out how to do so i would revert to fireworks for it! the source is linked to the pic!

another one that we use all the time so as not to reinvent the wheel is stealing layers from your other photoshop artwork. all you have to do is open your two psd's in two separate windows and drag and drop a layer from one to the other! depending on your file size you'll probably need to resize it but it can save you a ton of time if you're making numerous graphics for the same event in different sizes (ie advertising graphics). 

the other tool i LOVE to use that makes the proceeding ecard valid is a filter called liquify. there's no way to explain it other than to get in and use it. you can squeeze in and push out in all the right places. but be careful or you'll end up looking like this:

 but if you do it right this card can secretly hold true for you!!

Built In YouTube Video Editor

So today we needed to throw a quick video up that didn't need much editing. I had noticed that youtube now had it's own built in editor but I figured it wasn't worth using so i hadn't looked at it. I was wrong.

It essentially has all of the same basic functionality of iMovie or Windows Movie Maker but it might even be a little easier to use? I'm still on the fence. For us, I can think of one really cool thing we can do with it. We have over 400 videos loaded on our channel. If you use the built in editor you can go and pull clips from anything you've got loaded to your youtube. That sounds SO much better than digging through b-roll and project files to find information only to just recreate it. I can see us using this quite a bit in the future. Maybe when events repeat themselves and we want to do a preview video?

For personal use I am super excited about finding this. I load YouTube videos from my iphone. Now here's a way to splice them together without ever having to take up hard drive space with them on my mac. You can apply effects to the video, add audio, just basic editing. But who needs more than that for putting together home videos?

check it out: www.youtube.com/editor

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