Showing Off the Apps

Every other week at least? Really, Wes? Really? (My coworkers will get that joke....)

Yeah, it seems that the blog I had planned to write last week should have been written and posted last week to keep up with my goal of posting AT LEAST every other week.

Alas, alack!

I'll make up for it this week with pretty pictures and cool announcements.

Announcement 1: Trading Cards: The App is going live for iPads! The exact date is not known, but I am submitting the interactive to iTunes today for review. We're guessing it should be up and out there for download in a couple weeks <fingers crossed>.

And now for a pretty picture:

Sample of the Trading Card App printout

This is a final print out of a Fictional Person card from our interactive. I made this during testing, so it is a bit quick and dirty, but I thought it was pretty cool, so I decided to use it here.

The App allows used to add in their own pictures to the top area--I grabbed this one online. I believe it was one of the promotional posters for the movie Sucker Punch.

Note that me mentioning this movie here in how way reflects ReadWriteThink's view of the movie nor the views of any of the other editors or our parent organizations. I thought the movie was AMAZING! I was expecting a shallow, action-packed thrill-ride and found something that blew my mind. Haunted me for days! I'm not going in to any of my theories here in this post, but I did enjoy the movie so much that I made a couple cards based on the it, hence the Rocket card you see.

The App also allows for users to pick from a variety of styles for the card. I liked this one for Rocket because it is less stylized--which leans more focus on to action-packed image!--and does have a little softness and femininity in the way the purple fades, but is still a bold and vibrant color.

OK, that is image and announcement 1. Onto number 2.

RWT's second app, spear-headed by the NCTE team, was released to us last week for our first round of testing and it wicked cool! It is based on our Word Movie interactive but goes well beyond that in functionality and shear awesome. Similar to the interactive, you have a passage from a famous work from which you can select words to make into found poetry.

Unlike the interactive, it looks sleek, makes the words from the passage look like magnetic poetry strips, and has text from a few famous works preloaded, and has a large word bank that can be used instead of famous works. Users can also add their own words in case they have a particular list they need/want to use.

I have absolutely and totally NO permission from the NCTE team to post this picture, so I hope they won't get mad at me for doing so, but the initial testing  went so well and the app looks great; I wanted to show it off.

I call this poem Play on Words. Get it?

I didn't do much of a poem; some of my other works were longer. You can see the word bank is on the bottom, pops up and down into the work space. There are different background options as well. The words can be resized (I made them large since I was only using 2), rotated, and colored. The fonts can also be switched. Lots of options.

Again, this is alpha build stuff here, so things might change before it is finished and released.

For next time, maybe I'll see if Lisa or Christy want to chat about the latest interactive they have been working on, a redesign of the Print Press.We were testing that recently, too, and I'm excited to have that one released on the site. Very useful, very full-featured, and it looks great! I think the final release is scheduled for early September--but if I can get either of them to take a turn at posting here, they can probably give an actual date.

That's it for now. I'm out!

Wes