sinéad's lifestream

Non-digital brands offering free iPhone apps isn’t something new. Back in November I posted a short “homage” to the Denny iFry (2.5 stars), and I’ve tried out quite a few of these, like the Magic Coke Bottle (2.5 stars) or Lightsaber Unleashed (2.5 stars). All of these free apps are novelty at best, as you can see by their user ratings. Personally I don’t like to clutter my iPhone with apps I don’t regularly use, so these novelty apps are usually downloaded and played with for a week, maybe less.

I would argue that the key to using free iPhone apps as an effective brand awareness exercise, or as a way to drive physical sales, is not novelty usage.

Take for example the new app from the photography accessories company Joby, who primarily sell Gorillapods – flexible tripods for cameras. They now offer these tripods for mobile devices and with the launch of their new range they’ve made a free app to accompany these accessories. The Gorillacam app has an array of features you’d expect to pay for. It’s certainly not a one trick pony. It has a shot timer, time lapse, rapid-shot mode and a bubble level. There’s this great “press anywhere” mode too, that lets you press the touchscreen anywhere in order to take a photo. This app makes self portraits and photos with your friends really easy, something that’s virtually impossible with the standard iPhone camera app.

I can see myself using the Gorillacam app over and over again. I’ve already placed it beside my other camera apps – apps which I willingly paid for. I would have paid for the GorillaCam app too. I didn’t have to pay for it and in exchange I’ll be seeing the brandname Joby over and over again. I’ll also be constantly reminded of how if I bought a Gorillapod for my iPhone, I could fully utilize the brilliant features of this free app.

I may have initially been triggered with a desire for a sausage sandwich or a can of Coke, but with no motivation to use either app over and over again, the trigger was never reinforced again. With Gorillacam, I’ll be reminded of my interest in their products every time I happily use that free app.

Now that is an effective free, branded, iPhone app.

New York City is possibly the best place in the world to learn how to take photos. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful, interesting, gigantic or overwhelmingly familiar to snap away at.

I’ve talked about upgrading to an SLR for a long time, and was finally encouraged by my other half (a Canon 400d owner and a wonderful photographer/teacher) and the cheap prices of B&H in Manhattan. Straight after checking in to our hotel on 35th Street we rambled around the block to B&H and I picked up a Canon 450d, known in the USA as the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi – everything in the states sounds so much cooler.

We spent the next 5 days camera happy in New York, the results of which I’m really quite proud of. I’ve been taking photos for years, but have always been disappointed with the results of my experiments, until now. The differences between an SLR and a bridge camera are vaster than I realised and being able to carefully tweak all the settings for each set of photos you’re taking is a skill I’m going to attempt to master. Granted some of the photos I took in NYC aren’t perfect, but they make me smile nonetheless.

I feel like I’ve been able to capture the feelings I experienced there – the familiarity, the grandness, the beauty, the intrigue and the fun we had together. I’m looking forward to the next time I visit (somewhere in the near future), where I’ll bring back memories and photos of the city in snow and covered with Christmas.

I’ve spent the last 6 months with my head buried deep in research – the effect of which is that my brain has grown tired of reading. Believe me, when you’ve been reading and synthesising thousands of words a day this can happen. I’m burned out and I can’t seem to convince myself to process the written word (unless perhaps it’s 140 characters). I have reader’s block and graphic novels are about as close I’ve come this month to reading anything substantial. This is unfortunate considering I’ve managed to accumulate 10+ new books since the New Year that I’ve been too busy to read.

I’m not going to force it though, I think I just need a break, but I get bored far too easily slumped in front of the TV. I’ve just been in need of an alternative form of stimulation, but rather than allow my mind go soft, I’ve been enjoying aural and tactile stimulation instead – through podcasts, photography and putting the pieces together.

Podcasts: Every day I’ve been listening to “Stuff You Should Know” from howstuffworks.com – which are exceptionally easy to process because they make you feel like you’re listening in on someone else’s conversation rather than being lectured to. I can close my eyes and let the words sink in, my brain is softly soaking up what it finds most interesting and finding this aural input a wonderful break from concentrating on words on a computer screen. These 20 minute conversations have covered a wide variety of topics and I’ve been enjoying learning about subjects outside of Psychology and Technology for once.

Photography: I’ve wanted to take up photography as a serious hobby for many years. Now I’m finally starting to action this desire. I’ve taken 100’s of photos in the last few weeks, some of which are on my Flickr. I’m finding this a great source of relaxation, especially when combined with a long walk – Two weeks ago I walked for about 3 hours through the beautiful Portumna Forest Park, it’s been the most relaxed I’ve been all year. We just walked and walked, not looking at our watches, just snapping anything of interest or beauty to us. I can definitely see myself doing this more often.

Putting the Pieces Together: I’ve always enjoyed solving problems and working with my hands, but recently this has also been a great source of frustration for me. There’s always been a ticking clock, a deadline more important and distracting. So one of the first things I found myself doing once college was finished was buying a new desk, because I finally had the time to put the pieces together. (In retrospect, the comfy new desk would have been handy during my studies…) I really enjoyed the simple act of creating something from all the pieces and I’m sitting at this now with a small sense of pride. Following this I couldn’t resist picking up a Chinese 3D wooden puzzle when I saw them in George’s Street Arcade last week; my bookshelf is now home to a Tyrannosaurs Rex.

Both photography and putting the pieces together are simple acts of creation that require a person to conceive them. Without you, it’s just a scene or a set of instructions and pieces sitting idle. They are actions that require some focus and put YOU firmly in control. I find myself calmed by this. I imagine other people would too. Perhaps you’re feeling the impending doom of the recession and/or that you have no control over what happens to you, my suggestion to is that you try to relax by doing something physical that will lead to creation. If you prefer art, paint a picture, put it on your wall and let it remind you that you’re capable of being in control, of being that volatile element in your own environment.

Sometimes, our minds just need a break, and not just from reading.

Over coffee yesterday Darragh pointed out that he didn’t “Do the Flickr thing.” and I tried to explain why I thought he should. For someone that takes at least one photo a day and posts it to Twitter via a mobile photo sharing site he could greatly benefit from having somewhere like Flickr to permanently store and share his photos.  If it’s interesting enough to tweet then it shouldn’t be allowed to get lost and unshared after the tweet has washed away in the stream.

I myself have been using Twitpic to post the occasional interesting photo from my iPhone, but only when I’m on the move and I usually post these same photos to Flickr at a later date. Recently I’ve had much more free time to take photos with my “real” camera, and many of these photos are now on Flickr. Sometimes I’ll post a favourite photo to my blog and then link to the rest (rather than posting all of them as a long blog post). The reason I do this is the ability to tag, edit, archive and view stats – but there is so much more to it than that.

Flickr allows me to have a space online independent from my blog, my twitter, and my social networking. I have control on how they are displayed and archived (and can be as meticulous about this as I need), I can tell stories that go with the images, I can make notes to focus your attention to something special hidden within, and when I’m feeling nostalgic I can go back and review my own photostream based on tags I’ve created (see my tagcloud here). I can upload the well taken photos, and the badly taken ones too – if they say something that should be retold, they belong on my photostream.

However, what I really want to do with Flickr is share my photos, and see yours too. Today for instance I checked up on David’s travels in Beijing, Rory’s travels in Japan, I also met John’s gorgeous family, laughed at the bizarre mannequin Steph spotted, day-dreamed about Killiney Bay and wondered about the mind of an artist. Flickr can be a wonderful sneak peek into the lives of people you know and even strangers you might one day meet.

At the moment I only have 56 contacts (compare this to the almost 300 people I follow on twitter). I want more.  I want to follow your interesting lives, I want to comment on the things you’ve done and places you’ve seen. Almost every day I login to Flickr and check my contact’s uploads, the same way I login to Google Reader to check my RSS feeds – the difference is, photos can tell a totally different story, and can share the stories we don’t have the time to tell. Many of us lead busy lives, leaving us with not enough time or patience to blog as regularly as we would like, photoblogging is a taken a bit too seriously, but Flickr is a great way of sharing your life online without too much of a time or energy strain.

Plenty of bloggers that I read regularly will occasionally post their photos, but I always wonder about the photos that weren’t “good enough” for a blog post. Also, some bloggers are far better photographers than they realise and it’s a travesty that their incredible photos can disappear, lost in their blog post archives.

If you’re reading this and use Flickr add me. If you’re reading this and you post photos somewhere else, open a Flickr account and let us follow your life, taking a peek with each new upload.

Since my last post I have officially graduated from college, you can see all the embarrassing photos of myself and my classmates in our graduation gowns and caps over on my bebo page. I spent some time in cork working/training in the 3Store on Patrick’s Street, and other than that I’ve just been playing around with my new toy. I finally got my dream camera – the Fuji Finepix S5600 – it was a graduation gift from my parents, and by gift I mean they handed me money and said “We were afraid of getting you the wrong one.”

So far, I’ve yet to master the finer “complicated” functions of the camera, which is frustrating but also makes me realise that for once in my life I should probably read the manual. The camera takes fantastic photos and it’s really quick, making multiple shots very easy to take. The 10x zoom is incredible, it makes you feel like a spy. It’s a lot of fun. Getting clear close-up shots of small objects isn’t easy though, having tried to take shots of a bearded dragon at the weekend I’ve come to the conclusion that I must (yes, must!) purchase a fisheye lens and macro, for panoramic and close-up shots. I don’t have any other negative comments, I’m very happy with my purchase, I did have one small problem with it though.

After less than a week of it being in my possession there was one very annoying problem – the additional memory card I purchased with it was faulty. I lost all of the photos I took at the weekend. However, I was pleasantly surprised to come up against no hassle whatsoever in Pixels, where I purchased the camera. When I explained the situation, they simply gave me a new memory card, none of the usual arguments or “I’ll have to talk to the manager” bull that I’m used to from sales people.

So, to make sure it was working perfectly with the replacement card, I took some shots of my dog Ben, who is definitely no stranger to the camera, in fact he is quite the little poser as you can see below.

For years I’ve had an interest in digital photography but have never had the money to purchase my own digital camera, I’ve always borrowed everyone elses or used my god-awful vga camera on my mobile phone. I’ve been thinking that it’s about time that I purchased a digital camera of my own. Of course, when it comes to me and technology, I want the best there is to offer. I had my hopes set on getting a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera – the difference between a DSLR camera and a standard digital camera is the ability to view the picture you are taking via the lens rather than the viewfinder, giving you a truly accurate image. Unfortunately, even a 6 mega pixel DSLR camera is about €600. Which is definitely outside of my budget, for now.

The traditional digital camera market is completely saturated, and I’ve found it rather difficult to choose one (hence why I still don’t own one!) as my own terrible greed for “features” makes it impossible to stay within a reasonable budget. However, upon investigation I found an alternative to a DSLR camera that’s within budget. The Fuji FinePix S5600 Zoom: it’s only 5.1 megapixel, however it boasts 10x opitcal zoom. That’s impressive for €300, and it looks quite cool too. It has some wonderful features, for instance, movie recording in .avi format and the ability to change the lenses (I already have my eye on a fisheye! – ha ha).

The only drawback to buying a Fuji digital camera is the fact that they only take xD-Picture Cards, which is annoying considering I have plenty of MMC cards just lying around from old digital cameras and phones. If I’m to buy this camera I’ll have to purchase at least 1gb, which will set me back another €60, double the price of a standard MMC card. For now I’m not going to make any decisions, until I actually have the money. What fun it is to procrastinate.