Tag Archives: share with others

Using the iPhone to stumble upon interesting Photography articles

I follow a variety of photography twitter accounts and everyday hit a handful of blogs regularly on the subject. Some sites post content multiple times a day that is light and on the general subject of photography. Others, post less often with more specialized content.

Some of the best articles don’t come from the usual places or the expected sources. It is nearly impossible to follow everyone and watch what they are saying. A method I use to keep up on interesting stories without having to sift through every post from people to find their mention of a great article between their posts about what they had for lunch is StumbleUpon. Great site and even a handier free iPhone app.

StumbleUpon works via people finding interesting articles, then sharing to individual categories. This way, you only get referred to articles that you will want to look through. There are iPhone news apps that are great at giving you news with regular scheduled information, some are very nice, but all depend on the usual providers. Since StumbleUpon provides links narrowed to your specific interest, and anyone can suggest links, you end up reading people’s ideas and techniques outside of the main stream agency content.

Launching that free app for the first time, you can see what others are saying are popular areas of interests. You can choose one or many from this area, though they are at a high level.

Using the StumbleUpon’s Categories button along the bottom, you can see all of the areas of interesting, then drill down to particulars so you can get more or less specific content.

After you have your interested ID’d, SumbleUpon will show you your selected area to choose from. No lists of links or people to follow, just a button to go to a article on the subject your interested in.

Choosing of the buttons will take you to an article that someone has linked to on that subject. The service is called ‘StumbleUpon’ because you don’t know anything about the actual article till you get there. If you like what you read, give it a rating thumbs up or down if it isn’t worth anyone’s time reading. The article can be viewed in mobile Safari, shared via email and Twitter too. Rather than going back to the ‘Interests’ page, just tap the upper right corner StumbleUpon button to go to the next article.

Taking full control of your photo timelines via your iPhone

As projects or events get rolling along, I have a tendency to take pictures along the way. When I sync to iPhoto on the notebook, I try to get them tagged properly. Then, later, when it comes time to tell the story, I search for the images and build a folder of them.

I stumbled across a app today that appears to be built to help me out at being better prepared when it comes time to share the story with photos. The iPhone app Notica is for building a visual timeline that can later be shared with information already built in. The timeline is ‘stacks’ of notecards that you can quickly create when you snap a photo or later when time permits.

When a new Notica notecard is created. Some data can be inserted automatically like the date and location. Both of which can be edited later if needed. An image or a video as well as a descriptive note are added to each notecard. The cover art of the note’s stack shows in the upper left corner.

Images within each Notica notecard stack can be viewed and edited. Choosing the Edit button from this list view allows a card to be deleted or moved to another stack. Tapping a card in the list will show all the cards in full size side by side. Note’s text can be expanded or the cards can be reduced to show buttons for trash, move and share.

Within Notica, the groups of cards (either as just the image of the full card as below) can be saved to the iPhone photo library, sent  via email, shared on Facebook or Twitter and post to a Tumblr blog. The photo with information image is 1200 x 1545.