Sharing the Addiction

I was revisiting the wonderful ‘50 web 2.0 ways to tell a story‘ by CogDog while trying to find a way to record video directly into a web 2.0 tool to blog (which I am still looking for if you can help - leave a comment) and was looking at the Cutting Room Floor section at the bottom where he mentioned tools that didn’t work so well for him. I noticed that Smilebox was listed because it didn’t have Mac and PC options. I clicked on the link with idol curiosity and found that it now supports Mac as well so downloaded the free software to have a play with it. I think this is a BRILLIANT tool. It works really well with iPhoto and I imagine the PC version opens up your ‘My Pictures’ folder. There are a large number of templates to play with and each one has a number variations within it. You can simply drag and drop your pictures into the templates and change all the text to suit your purposes. I played with the newspaper template. You can then choose to blog it at the push of a button and it will upload it to your online Smilebox account and gives you the embed code. See my efforts below.

Make a Smilebox free ecard

Tags: smilebox

I have just been playing with some Mac freeware (I’ll have to do the same with some PC stuff soon). I am quite excited by iRed. I love Keynote and prefer it over Powerpoint but there are times I need to create something in Powerpoint due to our cluster having Macs and PCs. I know that I can make it in Keynote first and then export it (I do have a Keynote version of the Action Research powerpoint if anyone wants it) but I often have a number of little changes to make in Powerpoint due to some problems with compatibility so it can be faster to just make it in Powerpoint to start with.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Anyway, this is a long winded way of leading up to talk about iRed. One of my frustrations with opening Powerpoint to do my presentations is that the Apple remote that works with Keynote, does not work with Powerpoint. This is where iRed steps in. It lets you use the remote with a range of other software such as iTunes, iPhoto and Powerpoint. You can program the functions of the buttons on the remote and make up your own ‘layers’ for other software as well. Very cool!

Check it out by clicking here.