Hi!

If you were sitting the library studying today, maybe you were handed a sticker that looks like this "hi" logo. Well check out the article in today's Daily Pennsylvanian about the new "Hi!" app that Penn student (and frequent visitor to the Vitale Digital Media Lab) has created along with another Penn student (Tanvir Ahmed) and an Alum (Lukasz Dziurzynski):

White envisions hi! being used at events like New Student Orientation events and football games where students could meet new people. hi! generates a list of everyone in one location and based on users’ Facebook profiles, “autopopulates a list with the people that you have the most in common with or that it thinks you would get along the best with,” White said. “It’s kind of like an eHarmony match-up but for making friends instead of dating.”

Read the full article online at:

http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2011/12/college_graduate_and_two_sophomores_plan_launch_of_hi_app

What the heck is Fring?

Well, I'm glad you asked. Fring is an app for iPhone and Android that allows you to make phone calls, video calls, and text message. Um ok? I already have Skype, right? What's the deal? There is a new feature with Fring that supports group video chats! So now you and three friends can all video chat at the same time. Check out this Youtube promo video (sorry the song is a little annoying).

3D Images on the iPhone

We discovered (actually it was featured on Make:Blog and CNN) a really fun and groundbreaking app today for the iPhone. It is called Trimensional and it allows you to make a low quality 3d image using just the camera on your iPhone or iPad. This file can then be emailed as an actual 3d model file (which you could then print on a 3d printer) or as an animated gif. These are examples of images we took in the lab.

Here is a link to the app in the iTunes store and a video from the creator if you'd like some more details about the app. Feel free to try out the app on our iPad2 in the lab.

Epub file creation

I recently created my first .epub file. This is a type of e-book file that can be read on Android devices, the Nook, Sony Reader, and portable Apple devices among others. The files are a little odd in the way they need to be formatted. Here are a few resources I found helpful when creating my first document.

http://calibre-ebook.com/
Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. This program allows you to convert between several different formats.

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Sigil is Google's free multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor.

Adobe TV ebook creation using InDesign
This is a link to a series of three videos on Adobe TV about ebook creation using InDesign. These are what I primarily used to get started, and they helped a lot, although you need a little bit of an InDesign background to get started. You also need to be using InDesign CS4 or CS5 to export the .epub file.

showmypc.com

Do your parents ever call you up with mundane computer questions? Do you ever have a hard time walking them through something because they don't know what the "Desktop" is. Well your prayers for a simple solution have been answered. There have been many ways to remotely connect to a computer in the past, but showmypc.com is about the easiest one out there. This is a free service that allows you to connect to a pc, a mac, even devices running Android. Showmypc.com not only allows you to view other people's screen, but it allow you to control their computer remotely. It does have a slight delay, but it is completely functional for most needs.