Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. May your new year be filled with joy and abundance.
In my previous post (http://snipurl.com/93oxk), I mentioned that HiCard (http://www.hicard.mobi/Default.aspx) would be my favorite iPhone app for the festive season. In the last 24 hours, I have sent out more than 20 HiCards to my friends and more to go out today. I have a few choices of the e-card templates and the HiCard is nicely displayed on the recipient's email. Of course, before I sent out my first Christmas Greeting, I sent one to myself for testing.
While it's a nice little app, I thought there are a few things that the developer can take note of and improve further.
1. I can't save the messages. I like to tweak the message included in the HiCard to add a personal touch. It would be alot more time-saving if I could save the different notes for future use.
2. I can't check my global address book on the server. Unless the email address is stored locally on the iPhone, I can't add the email address directly from the address book.
3. I can't change the font type or size of the card.
4. While I can send the same card to multiple parties by adding all their email addresses, I would lose the personal touch as the recipient can see all the other parties' email addresses
5. It would have been a nice touch if I can insert a photo or picture or change the greeting message on the 'front cover' of the card.
But, despite all these, I think paying $1.99 for the HiCard is worth it. I do hope that the developer will continue to enhance the app and offer free upgrades to early adopters like myself.
The second iPhone app that I wish to talk about here is Animoto (http://animoto.com/) - the popular photo slideshow app that reportedly received overwhleming success when they first launched it as a Facebook Application. In 3 days, the number of users shot up from 25K to 250K (http://snipurl.com/93on6).
I just downloaded the free application from Apple AppStore and tried it out with 10 photos for a 30-sec slideshow (you can select anything between 8 and 16 images). The app also comes with 8 different genres of music and songs and 1 Featured Track for you to select the background music to the slideshow (with nice transition effects). Each genre has more than 10 selections.
The rendering takes several minutes and in the meantime you can play the previous videos that you have made. This is fun for those who want to make their photos into a MTV alike slideshow. What is a total let down is the last mile when you play the video. If you play the video using 3G network, the video will experience significant jitters and latency. What you need to do is probably wait for the buffering to complete and the video will then be loaded automatically. It would be really neat if I can save the video on my iPhone and play it anytime I like without consuming my data bandwidth or have it converted into a RSS feed. But it's free and I have no complains about it. If you want to share with a few more friends, consider using the iPhone composite cable and plug it into a TV and enjoy ( http://snipurl.com/93oum).
Try out and let me know what you think.
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