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Blogsy App for iPad makes mobile blogging easy

By Dennis Guten on January 8, 2012 No Comments

The Blogsy iPad AppDo you have an iPad and are you frustrated with the stock WordPress app for your blogging needs? I just purchased a new (new for me anyway) app called Blogsy that takes blogging on the iPad a notch up from that underwhelming experience. It works for WordPress.com, self hosted WordPress sites, Blogger and Posterious blogs. I’m creating this post in the app and it’s pretty easy. Some of the improvements from the regular iPad WordPress app:  
 

  • Rich text formatting – alignment, bold, italic, underline, quotes, colors, background color of text, font sizes, font family, lists
  • True HTML editing
  • Images – add from iPad, Flickr account, Picassa account, Google images
  • Videos – add from your YouTube account
  • Safari – add images and links by drag and drop

The Blogsy website has a number of how to videos that walk you through all the features and help files. The app was only $4.99 and so far has been well worth it. I’ll talk about it more after I have some more experience with it, but I think I have found my answer to blogging on the iPad. If anyone has had any longer term experience with Blogsy I’d love to hear from you on your experiences or any tips you might have.Check out Blogsy on their website.  

Categories : iPad, Software, WordPress
Tags : Blogging, Blogsy, iPad, Mobile, WordPress

Slow Shutter Cam iPhone 4 app beat my Canon T1i?

By Dennis Guten on February 9, 2011 No Comments

The University where I work, UT Dallas, is closed today due to the sleet and snow that fell overnight here in Dallas. While I was having breakfast I was watching the weather show out our front window and thought to myself that it would be fun to take a few snow/sleet pictures with an iPhone 4 app I bought recently for 99¢ called Slow Shutter Cam by Cogitap Software.

I wanted to see if the app would be good at actually showing the snow falling. I had taken a shot last week in the snow with the app and knew it could do it, but I wanted to expand upon the idea and match the iPhone 4 app against my Canon T1i DSLR camera to see which one did a better job with the shot.

So I set up the Canon on a tripod and framed a shot shooting through our front window out into the street. I tried to match the shot view as best I could with the iPhone. I took a number of shots with the Canon, shooting at different shutter speed/aperture combinations trying to get a slow enough shutter speed to capture the snow and sleet falling.

My results amazed me! I was using a Canon Ultrasonic 28-105mm 3.5-4.5 lens which gave me an f22 at the 28mm end. The shots I am showing were taken at 28mm f22 at 1/15th sec. exposure time (second shot) and 28mm f22 at 0.4 sec. exposure time (third shot). The iPhone 4 shot is at the top.

The iPhone 4 shot was the only one that really shows the snow and sleet falling. I just could not get any action out of the Canon DSLR in this situation. At 1/15th of a second, the DSLR had totally washed out the shot and obviously I needed at least a 3 second or longer shutter speed to capture the falling stuff.

The iPhone 4 handled it very easily giving me a shutter speed of 15 seconds at a sensitivity level in the app of 1. This was the best combo of settings I tested for the app. The actual size of the photo it gave me was 1936 x 2592 pixels, which is a good size, but not as large as the raw from the Canon, which was 4572 x 3162 pixels. I cropped them all down to the same pixel size and tried to keep the shot parameters the same. You can also click on these three shots to see a larger version of each.

Oh, and I did not use a tripod with the iPhone 4, I simply held it flush up against the window and held it steady through the 15 second exposure.

I will have to play around with this app some more using light trails and other experiments. You can take a look at the app on the Cogitap Software website where it goes into much more detail about the settings available and features. There is a link on the site directly to the iTunes store where you can read reviews as well or purchase the app.

For a buck this is a great steal of a photo app. If anyone else has tried this app I would love to hear about what you have tried to do with it.

Categories : Apple, iPhone, Photography, Software
Tags : Camera App, Canon, DSLR, iPhone 4, iTunes, Photography

My purchase of the Headway Themes WordPress template

By Dennis Guten on January 23, 2011 1 Comments

I did some research into paid WordPress template frameworks and finally decided to purchase the Headway Themes template recently.

The templates I looked at for WordPress were: Headway Themes, Thesis and Genesis. Of course there are others, but these are the three WordPress premium themes I zeroed my choice down to.

Headway Themes won out because of its’ excellent visual editor feature, which let’s you see the changes as you choose them instead of having to save the options then having to refresh your blog. There are a gazillion customization options and I really wanted to see what I could get done with it.

They offer two choices, Headway Personal for $87, which allows you to use the template on two sites or Headway Developer for $164, which allows unlimited use of the template. Either option gives you unlimited upgrades for life and support for whichever option you choose. I did the Headway personal option and found a 10% online discount coupon. I still have the option to upgrade to the Developer option for $77.

It looks like I just missed the 30% off discount coupons floating around in late December for Headway, oh well.

This site, which used to use the free Curious WordPress template, which I really liked, was my first test of Headway. I just wanted to see what I could do in a few hours of messing around with it and what you see is the result. The image below shows the before and after.

I went in and quickly created a custom header, all the nav colors and threw in what they call an image rotator leaf, which is the rotating slide show near the top. For the image rotator leaf all you do is upload some images and point to the URL of each image. You can tell it how long to display each and which transition you will use. It was super easy to create as long as you made each image the same size it worked like a charm.

These leafs, which I really think of as Divs, can easily be moved all over the layout by just dragging and dropping. That’s very cool.

I have not finished with customization of AloneOnTheWeb yet. I want to see what I can make the theme do. I am planning on using the second license I purchased for a freelance website I am in the early stages of redesigning for a freelance client. The site will have lots of photography and video so it should be a real good test of the capabilities of the Headway Themes template.

Has anyone else used the Headway Themes template for WordPress recently and have any comments?

Categories : Freelance, Headway Themes, Software, Web Design, WordPress
Tags : Freelance, Headway Themes, Template, Web Design, WordPress
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