I couldn´t resist and had to try the TiltShiftMaker on one of my New York Photo:

And another one from my Las Vegas trip:

Due to an unfortunate bug in iTunes I had to restore my iPhone from a backup the other day. Everything went well, except the order of my app icons. They were now all in alphabetical order. I try to arrange my app icons based on usage, i.e. the ones I use more often come first, starting with the first screen. Since all icons where back in alphabetical order this really made me wish there would be a feature which shows you the app usage. This could simply be shown in the “app wiggle mode”.

As we all know, when you press and hold an app icon, all icons start to wiggle and you can move them around or delete them. In this mode every icon could simply show how many times you pressed/used it in the last week, month or so. I made a quick mockup below to illustrate the idea. I think this feature, apart from grouping, which is supposed to be possible with v3.0, would be really helpful to organize your apps. What do you think? Or maybe I missed something and this is already planned?

> The ruins of Detroit (on this page, use the arrow on the left to click through the photos)

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry.

Until the 50’s, its population rose to almost 2 million people. Detroit was the 4th most important city in the United States.

It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods.

Increasing of segregation and deindustrialization caused violent riots in 1967. The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew. Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states. Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied.

Since the 50’s, “Motor City” lost more than half of its population.

Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization.

A strange man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

Remember the short film 405 a few years ago? For its time it had great computer generated effect, considering it was done ordinary desktop computers with off the shelf software. One of the guys behind 405, Bruce Branit, has spent the last few years on the production of Word Builder as a side project.  The film was a one day shoot that took two years to finish the post production on. For a look inside World Builder there´s an interview up on CG Channel. It´s a bit technical here and there but still interesting to read.

I was browsing vimeo on the weekend and came across these two great animated short films from students at Supinfocom, which is a design university in France.

Gary

Beautifully animated coming of age story about a young boy far away from the usual Pixar render style. The film´s website is also worth having a look.

Yankeegal

This short, although it looks more 3D, has also a very unique style which I like. It tells the story of a WW2 pilot with a strong mind who simply won´t succumb to death. Again, the website has a lot to offer with concept art and storyboards from the production process.

First of all, if you don´t know what Evernote (EN) is, you´ve really missed something. Evernote is a cross platform notetaking tool which acts like your external brain. You can add pretty much every information to Evernote: Text, images, webpages, files like PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, or photos, scanned documents or e-mails. You can store them online and access them through the website, desktop clients (Mac and Windows) or mobile phone (iPhone or Windows Mobile). All those platforms are always synchronized automatically. This all is topped off by a smart and fast search function and tagging system. If this sounds interesting to you, I recommend you go to Evernote´s website or watch their CEO Phil Libin explaining Evernote in less than a minute.

Breaking the habits

As you can probably guess by now Evernote is one of my favourite applications and I´ve been using it for about two years or so. But just in the last few months and especially with the launch of the iPhone app I´ve started using it every day and everywhere. It takes some time until you first though becomes “Hey, I should put that quickly into Evernote!”. Also it took me a while to make Evernote my first stop for looking up some information.

How do I use it everyday?

I´m always curious to find out how other people use the applications that I use. It helps to come up with new ideas or to optimize my user habits. But when you try to find examples of other Evernote users most of the time those example are very vague or general, like “I use it for recipes” or “all my business cards go in there”. Since this is not very helpful or wouldn´t completely sell Evernote to me, I want to share with you some every day examples of how I use Evernote:

1. Movie ticket booking number

I booked movie tickets online the other day. When the website displayed the booking number I just selected this bit and added it to EN with website clipper for Firefox. Since we hadn´t been at this Cinema before I also went to their contacts page and clipped the address to EN. On Saturday night we jumped into the car and I opened EN on my iPhone to get the address of the cinema, which I then entered into Google Maps for navigation. When we arrived at the cinema I pulled out my iPhone to get the booking number for the tickets.

2. Preparing a fax for the office

I had to cancel my old mobile phone contract which you can only do by fax. Since I don´t have a fax machine at home, I downloaded the Word form and dragged it into the EN Windows desktop client. Then I entered all my details. Next morning at work I opened EN and printed out the form and faxed it. The good thing is that you can even change a document after(!) you´ve added it to EN. You just double click on a Word doc in EN for example, make the changes and save it again – done.

3. Camera research

When I did the research for my new DSLR camera a few weeks ago, EN came in really handy. I just created a tag called “DSLR research” and whenever I came across a review or good bargain of cameras I was interested in I clipped and tagged it in EN. I even added snapshots of camera magazine reviews to EN. After I´d bought the new camera (a Canon 450D/Rebel XSi, btw), I was looking for a bag. So I went around camera shops, tried bags and took photos of them (especially the price tags). Back at home I compared my findings and searched for the lowest price etc. Since EN features an excellent character recognition I could simply search my notes for certain camera bag brands like Lowe or Crumpler. EN had indexed all the brand and models names on the price tags on my photos.

4. Remembering shopping hours

This may sound a bit silly, but I keep forgetting the shopping hours of my local supermarket or drugstore, especially the ones on Saturday. So I just pulled up EN on my iPhone, took a photo of the opening hours displayed at the shop entrance and added the name of the shop to the note.

5. E-ticket information for your flight

When I booked a flight for my next holidays the other day, I just added the e-ticket to EN which comes in handy when you arrive at the airport. No more paper print outs.

These are only a few examples of how I use Evernote. I will definitely add more of this in the future. But what about you? Are you using Evernote already? If yes, then please share some examples with us.