Welcome to AloneOnTheWeb.com, my little home on the web where I will write about family, life, web design, photography, technology and social media. That's my wife Ruthie and I in Golden, Colorado being silly in two shots.

Simple panoramic images in seconds with the iPhone app 360 Panorama

360-panorama

I purchased an iPhone app for photography a few weeks ago called 360 Panorama. It was late at night, so I tried it out from bed and the light was so low that the results were really poor, so I promptly forgot about it amidst the glut of apps on the phone.

So a few days ago I was doing my daily campus walk at Ut Dallas, where I work as a Web Designer and I found myself in the center of the campus, which had recently been renovated and redesigned. I remembered 360 Panorama and pulled the iphone out and took a quick full 360 degree photo from this spot.

Panoramic image of the UT Dallas campus

Well, in the phone itself, it’s pretty hard to see if the shot was good, but when I got back to the office I emailed the photo to myself and opened it up on my iMac and it was really nice. It comes out with this odd white border all around the shot where the app mixes the pieces of the shot together. A quick trip to Adobe Fireworks, my editor of choice, and the result was a great panoramic shot of the campus!

The full-size panoramic image is available if anyone wants to download it.

There are not too many controls, you choose either a white or black background for the uneven edges, push start and slowly and carefully move the camera around.

My boss thought it was cool and wants me to try it in a few months when the greenery comes back and to use a tripod. I’ll do that with the little iPhone 4 accessory I purchased recently called the Glif, which allows you to attach the iPhone 4 to a tripod.

360 Panorama is only $1.99 and well worth it in my opinion. Anybody else tried this app yet? What are your opinions?

My purchase of the Headway Themes WordPress template

headway-featured

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 ThemesThesis 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?

AT&T coverage fail in New Mexico

AT&T failed at New Mexico phone coverage

Yes, it’s another fail. I usually don’t complain so much, but on our recent trip to Taos, New Mexico our nice new iPhone 4 was an expensive toy that was only good for playing games.

I understand that when you are in the middle of the mountains, miles from anywhere, let alone a cell tower, cell coverage will be spotty. It was. The data coverage was pitiful though. In Taos, we did get the E network where we were staying, but it was so poor that we could not even get the weather report from weather.com.

In places where it should have worked and it showed a strong signal and either the E or G network, it just plain did not work.

If I lived there an iPhone would be the last thing i would want. Thank goodness I live in Richardson, TX where the G coverage is strong and the area is wide.

Anybody else have any trip stories about AT&T coverage?