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Lovely new Aesthetic Apparatus print: Miles Davis

As cliché as it sounds, the best camera is the one you have with you. Fret not if you don’t have an expensive DSLR. When you have your iPhone cam ready, under the right conditions, it can take some amazing images! With the help of these 10 tips, you’ll be able to your iPhone shooting images that look as great as any point-and-shoot.

1. Do not use the zoom function; your feet is the best zoom.

No matter how tempting, don’t use the digital zoom in. If you really want to take that shot from afar, it’s a sure thing that you won’t get the photo quality you’d want — a picture with noisy background, grainy texture and pixilated outcome. Instead, if possible, get closer to the subject and click on the camera button to shoot.

2. Do not use the flash function; get more light in the background.

The iPhone’s flash is not enough to shine good lighting over on the background and give you truly great digital photos. Rather, it tends to wash out or overexpose everything horribly, particularly the subject’s eyes. The problem can be solved with natural or indoor lighting. Though you may not see the dimness in your screen before taking the shot, once the photo has been taken, you will clearly see the difference when light is more present.

3. Stabilize your hand when holding the iPhone.

Notice that when either you or the subject you’re taking is moving or isn’t steady, the result of the photo would be blurry. To solve this, advise the subject to stay very still. For your part, hold your iPhone like a regular type of camera — steadily. Count to three and if you can’t make one hand stabilized enough, use both hands or find something like the wall or a chair to lean your back or arms on. Slowly click the shutter button to capture the subject and let the lens absorb more light to expose the photo nicely.

4. Tap to focus.

With built-in aperture, the autofocus function is already present in the newer version of the iPhone’s OS. It would automatically take the focal point and show a square on the subject to make it appear clearer. However in some cases, when it is not readily recognized, you have to suggest where the focus should be. Simply move closer and tap directly on the main spot of the subject to focus for better lighting and exposure and higher quality photos.

5. Try different angles.

The standing-straight position can sometimes be just boring, when you can have a lot more. Because the iPhone is just light and easy to carry and turn around, you have the advantage of playing with gravity. As the iPhonographer, try different angles to snap more interesting shots. Be artistic and build up on your imagination! You can try squatting down and shoot at a view lower than the usual eye or shoulder level. To be more comfortable, don’t be shy to sit down on the floor or stand on a chair in a crowded place. You will notice that you will not only capture the subject but also give the impression of how big the room is. You can make your subject loom bigger or smaller, with more dominance or greater depth, emphasis and drama.

6. Keep the iPhone cam’s lens clean.

Most of us carry our phones around everywhere but not our camera. When you have and use your iPhone with you all the time, even if it has protected casing, there is a good chance that the camera lens will get dirty. The iPhone cam’s lens is so small that even a small smudge or a fingerprint on it would affect the quality of your taken photos. Clean it regularly to maintain brightness with a handy microfiber polishing cloth, that piece of cloth you use to wipe off your eyeglasses or your old cotton t-shirt. Also clean the flash near the lens with soft circles, as to remove dust or blotches. Never use any polishing agent on the lens or the touch-screen area with aerosol purifiers, especially those which contain liquor, ammonia or other chemicals or severe substances. These could be harmful for your iPhone’s delicate, oil-repelling touch-screen technology.

7. Take again and again until you capture the best.

Unlike the old days when you had to buy films to practice your camera shooting abilities and find the best frames, digital cameras today offer us with the great incentive of trying and trying until we go tired. There’s no cost except for the draining of the battery and the memory space, of course. But these things can be easily replenished once charged up. Similarly like any regular digital cam, you can have lots of mistakes in using your iPhone camera. Take multiple shots of the same scene and just select the best afterwards. Don’t get disappointed and delete the comparatively “bad” photos as well; you can always use other photo-editing applications or software to improve their quality later on.

8. Experiment with apps!

As mentioned, you can use the many photography app available in the AppStore to edit photos. You can make a collage, combined photos with creative frames, different filters and gradient backgrounds, cartoon versions, embed them with layers of text and stamps and so much more. Install and mix these features from multiple apps. You’ll be surprised with the various results from these exciting applications.

9. Explore around you. Be adventurous!

Take the initiative to go around places and discover great things to capture candidly. People have stories within them and they change in every second with their emotions. Every corner of an establishment has something worthwhile. Whatever event may it be a birthday, a talent showcase, or a sports event there’s something in there you’ll find interesting. Look at the signs and slants of the street and document the wonders of normal everyday life. Magical memories happen only once. Just keep your thumb ready to click and snap them away.

10. Hold, then release.

Want the subject to be in focus and the background blurred out? The trick is to not take it easy and tap the shutter button right away! Instead, before doing so, hold it down for a few seconds until you’re ready to release it to prepare and compose yourself first. This will also relieve you from shaking probabilities and prevent crappy photos.

About a year ago, I reviewed an app called Extensive Notes for Android right here on Android.AppStorm. Among a whole army of note-taking apps on Android, Extensive Notes differentiated itself by providing a huge array of small but useful tools to supplement the core feature.

Fluffy Delusions, the developer behind Extensive Notes, recently released a new app called App Garden, which takes all those extra tools and wraps them together into a single multi-purpose package. The point of the app is to provide dozens of tiny but useful tools to help you with day-to-day tasks without having to install separate apps for each one.

In this post, I’ll try to make sense of what the app has to offer, where it shines and where it needs more work. It is a tough ask, mind you, since there are so many tangentially different things you can do with this thing. Let’s start with a quick overview of what it has on offer.

Swiss Army Knife… and Then Some!

Calling App Garden a Swiss Army Knife for Android might well be an understatement. It come with not 10, not 20, but a whopping 45 apps at last count – some of them even with more apps within them. I’ll not bother covering everything here for the sake of brevity, but here’s a quick sample:

• Health related tools like BMI calculator, calorie intake, body fat, heart rate, and metabolic rate calculators
• Language tools like dictionary, thesaurus, spelling suggestions, phrase lookup, word suggestions, and pronunciation guides.
• Music and movie related tools including album art search, artist information, and film reviews and info.
• Finance related tools like mortgage calculator, tip calculator, stock quotes, and tax calculators.
• Knowledge and general information tools like Wikipedia search, weather, urban dictionary, and area code lookup.
• Miscellaneous utilities like reminders, stopwatch, timer, unit and currency conversion, notes, audio recorder, and system stats.

And trust me, I’ve not even listed half of what’s available. As you can tell from the list, the developer went all out in trying to cram anything and everything that one might want on their phone into one tiny package (and I do mean tiny – it’s under 1 MB).

On deeper inspection it is evident how they have managed to do that, but I’ll come to that later. For now, I’ll focus on that fact that all of this does prove useful when you get down to using it. Most smartphone users tend to download and install tens, if not hundreds of apps on their phones, only to use them just once in a while, so having all these small tools waiting for you to feel the need for one, without hogging all the memory and screen space on your phone, can be quite empowering.

Of course, you can expect to be sliding through a long list of nearly 50 apps to find what you need, so there’s the “Favorites” list so you can pin the ones that you think you will be using most and have really quick access to just those at a glance. As far as app-wide features go, this is pretty much as fart as App Garden goes. You can set your preferred location, currency and units from the app’s Settings menu, so the tools will start up the way you need them.

It is hard to choose favorites when there are so many things one can do with the app, but if I were to highlight some of my most used tools from App Garden, it would have to be the timer, financial calculators and unit conversion. Although the unit conversion toolset contains currency as well, that one’s pretty much unusable because the list of currencies is not sorted in any decipherable way. Given how many options there are, it is close to impossible to find what you are looking for without literally going through all hundred-odd entries one by one!

Minimalism Above All Else

So here’s the downside of trying to cram all of that power into a tiny little package: all you get are the bare basics. Sure, the app feels extremely minimalistic and turns out to be pretty snappy in the process, but there are times when it leaves much to be desired.

Take the timer, for example: you can set a time and the app will count down just fine, but there is no audio or vibration notification at the end. You need to be looking at your phone to be able to tell when it reaches zero. The Start and Stop buttons are always there and active, so I can tap the Start button while the timer is on, although nothing happens. This is a common pattern across most of the tools.

Also, tools often have the exact same look, with absolutely no way to tell what they are supposed to do. Look at the example below. The two screens belong to the Timer and the Audio Recording tool. Can you tell which is which?

To top it off, a big chunk of the functionality is dependent on an active data connection. That would be generally fine, as long as the app made it clear that it couldn’t do something because you don’t have a data connection. Instead, App Garden just throws a “An error has occurred” message at you. The least one would expect is a message explaining what the error was.

Another example of simple oversight is the list of currencies, which (as I mentioned before) is not sorted in any decipherable way. It is minor niggles like this that take away from an otherwise excellent and well rounded toolset.

Conclusion

At its core, App Garden gets the idea right – it’s a set of disparate tools all packaged together for you to use the way you need to. It is a no-frills yet comprehensive app that set out to do some simple things and do them well. There are niggles and surprising omissions that keep the app from being really great, but don’t really take away too much from the feat it achieves in the end.

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We’ve come a long way since the first silent movies of over one hundred years ago. Advertisers and film studios are still trying to find new ways to attract audiences to see their latest movies. The movie poster has long been a classic example of the evolving times in advertising and design. With amazing illustration,…

ERP systems, which stands for enterprise-resource planning, are pretty much the heart and soul of every single modern company. They manage virtually every aspect of a business, from the sales and purchasing to the accounting and project management departments. Without them, a company is virtually unable to run smoothly without a massive, unnecessary manual exchange of information. Every single department needs to communicate with one another (for example, the production department of a company would need to know what the projected sales figures are for a particular time period in order to ease planning), and ERP systems make this possible with one unified solution.

The only thing is, ERP systems can be complex and expensive, and would be far beyond the budget of most smaller companies. ERPNext is an interesting ERP web app that takes much of the complexity out of ERP, and is more affordable to boot. Let’s take a look at it and see what ERPNext could mean for businesses looking for a better ERP solution today.

The 900lb Gorilla in the World of ERP

The problem facing many companies nowadays is that a proper ERP system is very expensive and difficult to implement. The market leader in these kind of systems, SAP AG, would cost a middle-sized company (so we’re talking fewer than 1,000 employees) around $10 to $20 million in software, hardware and consulting costs, something which can put a big dent in a company’s bank account. It’s not just the cost of the system itself, as many require dedicated servers and new computer architecture to be able to function properly.

So this is where ERP systems turn to the web. After all, why spend money on new servers when there are already plenty of them out there in the world? Web-based ERPs not only reduce a company’s overhead on hardware costs but also ease the setting up and implementation of such systems. ERP Next is the perfect example of this – a web-based ERP system that runs every department of a company with the minimum of fuss and maintenance.

Let’s take a look at it now.

First Thoughts

Unlike many ERP systems, ERPNext is open-source and is designed for small to medium-sized businesses. It is based on wmframework which was built primarily for the system itself but also features plenty of customisation options (there’s even a page on their website dedicated to this).

ERPNext is available as a subscription option, which is currently priced at $299 yearly for up to 5 users. The unlimited users option can be had for $599 a year and if you need your own dedicated server and full open-source support, then this costs an additional $599 a year.

For this review, I will use the Demo version of ERPNext, which is available on their website for all to use.

Interface

When you first start up ERPNext, you are greeted with the Index page with icons for each individual section (or “module”, as they are known as) of the system. A toolbar runs along the top (which is accessible from each module in the system) giving you quick access to other modules as well as reporting functions and recent items used. As ERPNext is web-based, it can be used on a wide variety of devices (including tablets such as the iPad), meaning there are no issues with cross-compatibility (unlike most ERP systems, which are usually Windows-based).

Modules

As we’ve seen above, each individual section (or department) of a company is known as a module in ERPNext, so let’s take a look at a few important ones in a bit more detail.

Accounting

With ERPNext’s accounting system, you can view your company’s chart of accounts and cost centres as well as a wide range of reports. There are also built-in tools (such as bank and payment reconciliation) to help you keep your accounts more organised and you can create invoices from purchase orders from this module as well.

In the demo system, the main currency used is Indian rupees (seeing as the developers are based in India). However, you can choose whichever currency your company uses. Reports can also be customised to suit your business needs as well.

Sales

The Selling module of ERPNext not only allows you to modify exactly what your company is trading but also has the ability to report on all your company’s sales as well as predictions for the next quarter based on previous results.

The Selling module also manages both existing and potential customers (including follow-ups on any offers sent), as well as quotations and some accounting aspects (for example, gross profit on sales).

Inventory Management

Knowing exactly how much stock is in your company’s warehouse is extremely important, as it shows the sales department exactly how much they can sell to particular customers, and also helps with production planning (if the company manufactures its own products) or purchasing (if the company trades goods sourced externally).

In the Stock view, you can set up new warehouses and view each product in your database, along with its characteristics and aspects. If a particular product is running low, you can automatically create a purchase order from this view without having to go into a different module and you can reconsolidate stock (for example moving it to different warehouses) easily as well.

Organisation

ERPNext tries to cut down your reliance (and costs) on other third-party software by providing a built-in to-do list, calendar and simple messaging service. You can share events with co-workers as well as track scheduled appointments and the messaging service allows you to send short messages and documents within ERPNext to other users of the system.

Summing it Up

ERPNext has really shown me that enterprise-resource planning systems don’t have to be really complicated, expensive affairs. I have good experience with working with SAP and I can tell you now – the learning curve is extremely steep and you can spend hours on end studying the system in detail and only touch the tip of the iceberg.

Owing to the sheer size of ERPNext, I couldn’t cover every single aspect of it in this review so the best way to try it out for yourself is to head over to the live demo on their website and have a play with it there. It’s simple, powerful and jam-packed full of features, and it will surely do your company wonders for the future.

“When launching a new [digital] product, let’s focus more on discussing its PURPOSE and less UI details and features.” - Fictive Cameron

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In this giveaway, we’ve teamed up with our friends at TheAdStock to give five lucky Six Revisions readers each 100 points of credit (worth $99) that they can use on TheAdStock stock photography site. Read on to find out how you can be one of the five lucky winners!

About TheAdStock

TheAdStock is a stock photography site where you can buy images for your banner ads, websites, blogs, flyers, brochures and other advertising materials, digital or printed.

Check out their growing collection of stock images (they add to the collection each week).

TheAdStock was created by Smartketer LLC, the same company that came up with BannerSnack (an online banner generator). TheAdStock was a natural step in the company’s efforts to help users create the best banners. The idea grew into a collection they’d like to offer to anyone who’s into making ads, websites or prints, to help make their jobs simpler.

Smartketer has other tools for creative professionals such as SliderWall, SnackTools and JS Charts.

Follow TheAdStock on Twitter and Like them on Facebook.

How to Win

For a chance to win, simply answer the following question in the comments:

• How would 100 points on TheAdStock be useful to you?

Giveaway Details

This giveaway ends on Tuesday, May 29, 2012, after which the comments section on this post will be closed and you will no longer be able to leave a comment. Please leave a valid email address when filling out the comment form so that we can contact you if you’ve won. Please only comment once. The winners will be randomly selected using a similar method as previous Six Revisions giveaways. The winners will be announced on a separate post. You are advised to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can be quickly notified when the winners announcement post has been published. Please note that comments are moderated and so your comment may not show up right away. Please note that comments that do not follow the instructions on how to win (described above) may not be published, or may be removed later on.

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About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

This might be my new favorite housewarming gift for my friends moving to the suburbs: Key Hiding Rock.

It’s not just me; I’ve asked around: You will probably be your own very worst client. Ever.

Every trade has a similar story to the point where it’s almost cliché: the carpenter’s house is falling apart, the mechanic’s car is a rattling jalopy, and the barber is a balding chatty guy who’s always forcing loved ones into drawn-out awkward small-talk. It only makes sense then that the web designer’s site would be mired in all sorts of miserable problems.

Working on your own site is incredibly hard! You’ve just worked all day on other people’s websites, now you’re going to do yours, on your own time — for free. Ugh! Add to this the pressure of doing your “best work”; you start thinking of incredible ideas and scope-creeping the possibility of it being doable into oblivion.

We’re web designers — this medium is our message, but it’s also where most of our amazing community spends a lot of free time. The pressure to do something outstanding can be pretty crushing. All too often we psych ourselves out, or produce something that doesn’t satisfy.

You’re not alone in this struggle.

I recently refreshed my own personal site into its tenth iteration. That’s right. I’ve done this ten times. The previous nine times have been the dismal and painful worst-case experience I’m talking about. I have been a terrible client. I’ve been demanding, unreasonable, and had vague goals. I never gave this problem much thought until this recent work. These are all symptoms of being unfocused, and not looking at the problem objectively.

If this is something you have gone though, or are in the midst of now it’s time to approach this project different than you would a client’s site. For version 10 for ArleyM.com I decided not to compromise anymore. I invented a few ground rules for myself right from step one. This made the project a joy to work on.

Every client is different (especially when the client is you!) Consider reworking these, or making your own rules to fit with your project:

1. Have fun with it

Self explanatory: if I’m not enjoying working on it, I won’t enjoy the end product, and I’ll never update it. This is my free time. I need a personal project to be fun; this can’t be just-another website. I wasn’t working to a goal or deadline, so I had a freedom to make this rule: the instant this work becomes a drudgery I will go and do something else. I’ll come back to this when I’m feeling inspired and pumped about it again.

2. Break your own rules

This goes hand-in-hand with step one. At work I keep best-practices in mind: write clean semantic code, and make a professional product worthy of our client’s money. I relate following rules to work, which isn’t always fun. At home I shouldn’t hold myself to these restrictions. Browser hacks? Sure! Messy code? OK! Doing crazy impractical things? Yup! I’m the boss of this website, so I will break rules if I feel like it.

3. Do something new

If you’re like me there are a few experiments and techniques that you’ve been itching to try. I like to think of my personal site as a production-level sandbox. Your take on some new technique, or trying out something that’s never been done before will make your site fun, and in the end will score you some traffic from your peers. I put a lot of time and thought into different things I wanted to try for my own site. I wrote about ten things I did on my front page on this post. The bonus to this is that it will stretch you and make you better for client projects too.

4. Be simple

The tendency is to over complicate things in the name of awesomeness. Keep in mind that simple olde-timey principle: Release Early, Release Often. You can iterate and add to your site – this isn’t print, you’re not committing this work for posterity. Think about specific problems on your current site that you’re trying to solve, and solve those. Your site doesn’t have to be everything to everyone when it launches. This sound familiar? We create requirements and goals with clients too! There is beauty in simplicity.

5. Go easy on inspiration

With so many amazing galleries out there like Dribbble, Awwwards, Best Whatever, etc. it’s way too easy to get inspiration overload. I actually usually find inspiration counter productive. Sometimes I’ll see work so great that I begin to feel like “it’s all been done”, or “it’s being done better than I can ever achieve”, or some other anti-inspiring counter productive nonsense. For me, inspiration is good to get thinking along the lines of a certain feel or aesthetic that a client is after – but for a personal project I already know what I like, and I usually have a good idea of how I want the site to look, feel and work. Force yourself to close all of those tabs, and get your head down.

These rules aren’t for everyone, but the spirit of them may be worth considering. I know I’m a “Production” guy, but it’s important to remember that for my own site I’m also the Account Manager, Project Manager, Content Coordinator, and client! For any work I ever do for myself in the future I will first write out a set of constraints like this.

Getting started

The first step is key. Have a reasonable to-do list. “ArleyM.com redesign” sat in my Gmail task list as a massive, daunting item for a very long time. Do you have a two word item on your list that represents an incredible amount of time and effort? That’s a terribly unmotivating starting point as I found out. Break that gigantic thing down into actionable steps, preferably tasks that can be done in less than an hour. Once you start making headway on a few of list items, creativity begins to snowball and the work becomes easy.

Keep going

The bad news is you’re never really done working on your site. Think of it as something continually in a state of progress. Regardless of whether you’re a terrible client to yourself, or an amazing one – you will always be your most important client, and as such you deserve regular and consistent attention.

I try to make time every week to look at polishing some detail, or writing blog posts, or simply getting involved in the conversation elsewhere online. My buddy Andy Patrick is really good at keeping his site fresh. His recent personal site redesign got some attention in online galleries, and he’s had a steady respectable amount of traffic. For many people this is the very definition of success, and a site that has reached the goal – but Andy is still tweaking pixels and details. This tiny, but regular attention will keep your site from transforming into that giant unkempt mess that you started with. Don’t be that designer who is constantly scrapping and rebuilding from scratch (trust me, I did it for years!), keep your project alive and evolving with consistent love. Andy’s approach has inspired me, and I have a list of the next three phases for upgrading my site over time.

Are you pumped? Ready to rock this thing now? My last bit of advice is to leave the computer, grab a pencil and pad and go somewhere far away from glowing screens and broadband access. Let the creativity flow and come back with a plan.

What are some barriers you’re creating that are stopping you from doing great work for yourself?

Today’s post is by Arley McBlain, a front end developer in Burlington, Ontario at Thrillworks. He has a passion for coding outside-the-box and creating unique web experiences. You can follow him on Twitter as @ArleyM.

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Number Mugs. I am all for #8!

Finding a new film that would interest you can be difficult. So many new movies come out each year, but then, the majority wouldn’t be ones you’d necessarily want to watch. Plus, there’s so many classic movies that you might really like, but would never hear of without searching for them.

We got the chance to talk to the Goodfilms team, who are working on developing their app to help people find movies they’ll love easier. Following is our interview with them, where they talk about how they can give better recommendations for movies, their thoughts on Netflix recommendations, and how they use web apps to build their app.

Disclosure: Goodfilms is founded by two former staff of Envato, the company that owns and operates AppStorm.

Could you tell us a bit about your team: when did you get started, where are you located, and what makes you excited to work on Goodfilms each day?

Right now Goodfilms is just Glen (@glenmaddern) and I (@johnbarton). We’re based in Melbourne, Australia (specifically, in the spare bedroom at Glen’s apartment in Fitzroy). Glen got started around the middle of last year as a bit of a hobby project, then joined the AngelCube startup incubator. While Glen was going through that process, he and I would catch up over drinks every week or two and bounce ideas back and forth, and then eventually I got sick of suggesting things from the sidelines and jumped in with both feet.

For me personally, thing that makes me excited to work on Goodfilms every day is the warm feeling I get when I see people finding new films to watch they never would have heard of otherwise. I find watching films propagate through my social network really interesting and exciting. I’ll have two friends with a few degrees of separation between them end up watching the same film because of the way people’s ratings flow through everyone’s social connections.

Why why Goodfilms? What what the inspiration behind creating it?

That’s a big question. The original inspiration was that Glen just needed one place to keep a list of all the films his friends were telling him that “he had to see”. I used to keep a spreadsheet of top rated IMDB films and which of them my friends had seen so that I could organise our group movie nights.

The fact that Glen and I both had to come up with our own solutions to keep up with what our friends had seen (and want us to see) made it clear that there was an unmet need for a web app to help with where your friends and movies overlap. The next piece of the puzzle was the rating system we use (the two axes, quality and rewatchability) – none of the existing film review sites gave us anything to differentiate between the critically acclaimed “masterpieces” and the really enjoyable “guilty pleasures”. We took those two ideas, smashed them together, and boom – we’ve got Goodfilms.

Goodfilms right now shows movies recommended by other Goodfilms users that you’re friends with on Twitter or Facebook. What about films friends just mention on Twitter or Facebook? Could Goodfilms in the future surface those too?

I think that in the future we will probably start using data like that to feed into our system, but for right now we’re focusing on getting as many people to rate films using our two axis system. There’s certainly a bit to learn from the data around incidental mentions, but we’re getting the biggest bang for buck is finding out where different people put the same film on the graph.

Netflix famously held a contest for a better movie recommendation algorithm, and then didn’t put it to use. How will you crack the code for recommending movies better than other services?

It’s really funny you bring up the Netflix recommendation competition, because this is something Glen and I have talked about over and over again between us. Fundamentally, Netflix needs a very complicated algorithm to recommend films because their data “quality” is low.

We did some research a little while ago into existing rating systems and found a big public dataset called MovieLens, which includes 10 million film ratings. Of those ratings, two thirds were between 3 & 4 stars. When you’ve got data that looks like that, devoid of any further context, it’s a very difficult problem to solve. By working from a two axis rating system we get a lot more interesting information to work with. We then can combine that data with other data we’ve got about how films work their way through the social network, we should be able to make some fairly solid recommendations.

Could you share a bit about your development process with us? Are you using any cloud services like Amazon EC2 in Goodfilms?

Our development processes are fairly ad hoc given there are only two of us contributing to the codebase. We’re generally shipping code to the live site once or twice a day. For bigger projects where we need to keep a closer eye on the code changes we sometimes use Github pull requests to make code review a bit easier.

It’s a Ruby on Rails application, and we’re using Postgres as our main datastore. We’re currently hosting the site on Rackspace Cloud Servers (Rackspace’s EC2 equivalent). It can be a difficult choice sometimes whether it’s best to host your app on traditional servers or on cloud infrastructure. Luckily for us, we have very light disk IO requirements, which is a pretty common roadblock to cloud hosting, so we’re free to take advantage of the pricing in the cloud.

What do you think about the state of video streaming and digital video purchases online today?

I think the state of online streaming was best summed up by The Oatmeal with their Game of Thrones comic. Hilarious comics of internet piracy aside, I think it’s a really interesting time for online streaming. Apple have definitely shown with their success with music in the iTunes store that if you straight up compete with piracy instead of ignoring it that there is money to be made. Between them and Netflix (and Amazon and Google) things are getting better, but the market is still really fragmented.

We’re hoping to be part of the process that makes it easier for people to do the right thing. We figure that for a lot of time-poor users, if you’re catching up with what your friends are watching, and you find a new (or old) movie you want to watch, if it’s easier to just click through and watch legally you’re probably going to do it.

If there was one thing you could change about the movie industry online, what would you change?

Personally, and it’s not just a movie industry online thing, but online’s a big part of it, is that I’d like to see film distribution and release timelines shaken up. I’m constantly finding out about new films that sound great, and then find that it’s not coming to a cinema near me, or won’t be available in Australia on dvd for another year, or is locked up in an exclusive content deal with a service that can’t stream to Australia. I’d be happy to spend money on these films if I could, but the opportunities just don’t come up.

Thanks to regular social media, and hopefully in the future because of Goodfilms, it is a lot easier to find where the demand for niche films is, and to really target the delivery and marketing of them. That the film industry still only interact with “regions” when the internet has flattened them all out is pretty annoying.

What web apps does your team use daily?

Github! Github and google everything – gmail, analytics, docs, etc are the main ones.

We’re also using NewRelic for server performance monitoring, Wormly for uptime checks and sms notification, gauges for extra analytics, Airbrake for error logging, Verifyapp for UX testing, Xero for our accounting… and I think that’s about it.

Could you share anything about your future plans for Goodfilms?

Well, it’s pretty clear that a recommendation system is part of our future (given it’s mentioned right there on the homepage), but we’re not 100% sure when we’re going to make that our prime focus. We’ll be pushing more on our integration with the online streaming services so that you can always find a good film to watch. We’re also going to be spending a fair amount of time on our UX to make rating and sharing films as pleasant as possible for the users.

Beyond that, we start getting into the secret master plan territory and I’ll be keeping my mouth shut.

Thanks, Goodfilms team!

We’d like to extend a special thanks to the Goodfilms team, and especially John, for taking the time out of their busy schedules to do this interview with us. Goodfilms definitely looks like a nice option for finding new movies and sharing your thoughts on your favorite films with your friends, so be sure to check it out. We’ve got an in-depth review of Goodfilms coming up here on Web.AppStorm soon as well!

This past week, Google Chrome overtook Internet Explorer to become the most used web browser in the world (well, at least for a day). While calculating the exact figures when it comes to the internet is hardly a precise science, Statcounter shows that Chrome has been growing at a steady rate at the expense of both IE and Firefox.

Ever since its inception, Chrome has been winning converts and its rise in popularity does not seem to be stopping anytime soon.

If we look at the Statcounter data closely, there are some interesting revelations:

• For a start, IE is still the runaway leader in North America, whereas Firefox dominates the scene in Europe and Africa. Chrome has a tremendous lead in certain parts of Asia and South America (where Chrome’s share reaches as much as 50%).

• IE fares well during weekdays (excluding IE9, which puts up a decent show on weekends), whereas Chrome wins on weekends, perhaps indicating that people tend to use Chrome at home to browse on weekends, while IE is still ‘enforced’ in certain offices.

Until last year, IE had as much as 45% of the market share – today, its supremacy is very clearly under question. What will the figures be one year from now?

Any guesses or thoughts? Feel free to share with us in the comments.

DIY just added the explore stream which makes me want to go home and make something with my kids asap. Kids crafts/art is the best.

Photo by Wim de Leeuw

The Courtesy Table by the Dutch designer Marleen Jansen is low on the practicality scale but wins lots of points for its entertainment and sculptural factor.

(via kidsroomzoom)

Submitted by: Paul Mosig @r_a_c_k_e_t Role: Designer & Developer

Very simple website execution, the fixed header/navigation bar does give it a level of interest interaction wise, as well does the FAQ section. It’s the illustration work that sets this site off for me. I love the vibe and tone they set, this collage looking design esthetic is simply beautiful.

In the modern world where the white iPhone 4 and 4S are ubiquitous, the lighter colored phone is no longer the highly sought after mythical beast it once was. However, the white iPhone 4 did not launch until several months after the initial announcement. Companies like RapidRepair offer white conversion kits for early adopters who wish to thoroughly change the color of their iPhone (all ports and glass). Today, we’ll be taking a look at RapidRepair’s service, repair, and parts quality. Is their White Conversion kit just as good as the official white iPhone? 

Features

• This kit comes with: white LCD/digitizer combo, white dock, white headphone jack, white back panel and white home button.
• The screen and glass are manufactured as one part and cannot be separated.
• These parts have a high degree of difficulty to install.
• We will keep your black parts after install.
• These are high quality aftermarket parts to convert your iPhone 4 to white

Our Impressions

Ordering Process

  First of all, let’s talk about the ordering process. If you choose to install the White Conversion kit yourself, simply purchase the kit from the website and wait for it to arrive. If you want a RapidRepair technician to assemble your iPhone, you place an order with the RapidRepair assembly selected, and send in your iPhone to the specified address. If you have any special requests or notes, make sure to enter them on the ordering screen. No, RapidRepair doesn’t provide inbound shipping labels at the moment, which isn’t all that big of a deal but certainly doesn’t expedite the process as other companies do. Once they receive your device, they’ll send you an email with the estimated wait time for your repair. Once the repair is completed, they’ll send you another email with a tracking number (UPS Ground in our case). It would have been nice if RapidRepair had provided a more personalized process after they receieved and repaired the phone, perhaps giving notifications regarding the status of the device. Competing repair services do offer said personalized repair processes and while not everyone may want this, we see it as a plus. Turnaround Time
If you’re wondering how long it’ll take for you to get your iPhone back, here’s the chronology for our repair. On 4/23, we shipped out our iPhone from California via USPS and it arrived on 4/25. On 4/26, RapidRepair notified us that it had shipped out from Michigan via UPS Ground and provided a tracking number which estimated a 5/2 arrival back in California. The turnaround time was pretty bad - even though RapidRepair completed the conversion and mailed out my phone in a day, UPS took an entire week to deliver the package. Using a first generation iPhone as a temporary phone for over a week is most unpleasant, as you can imagine. RapidRepair’s FAQ claims that devices typically return within 2-5 days in the US and would take 7-14 internationally. Repair Service

Nine days after I sent out my iPhone, it came back in a bubble wrapped UPS bag. Inside were two individually bubble wrapped packages - the iPhone and the original black parts. On the White Conversion Kit product page, RapidRepair notes that it keeps the original black parts from your iPhone. We received ours back because we particularly specified that we wanted the parts for comparison. RapidRepair states that you can ask for original parts back but that may result in an added cost to you. RapidRepair returned the phone exactly as I left it - restored on a iOS 5.1 custom firmware. By browsing the multitasking tray, I found that they had tested the camera and phone to ensure everything was functioning properly. Everything was well installed and functional; there were no major anomalies that would have been caused by the repair. However, we could’ve sworn the ambient light sensor was more sensitive prior to the conversion. At one point, we held our iPhone directly up to a light but the brightness remained dim despite default settings with automatic brightness turned on.  White Conversion Kit

Let’s talk about the quality of the parts. The White Conversion Kit includes the front glass (plus LCD), back glass, dock connector, and headphone jack. For the most part, the RapidRepair aftermarket parts are pretty good. But since they’re not originals from Apple, there were some differences.

First of all, the shade of white is not exactly correct and tends to be a bit “gray-er” and more translucent than the white of original part. It’s not something you’ll notice right away until you compare it with a white iPhone but once you do compare them, you’ll realize that they’re quite different. It’s not something we’re troubled by on a daily basis but it’s significant to note if you’re OCD about the exact shade of white your iPhone glass comes in (if you want a closer look at the difference, it shows up pretty clearly in the camera lens closeup photo below).

Another minor difference we discovered was that the paint around the screen seemed to be slightly thinner, allowing a sliver of the LCD’s edge to bleed through. An oleophobic coating does not seem to be present so if you’ve got oily hands you’re going to have to get some sort of film to prevent your iPhone from becoming disgusting within a few minutes of usage. Otherwise, the screen seems to be of the same Retina Display quality and responsiveness.

Our particular display has a minor defect on the left side of the LCD - a tiny bubble (which we presume is between the glass and the LCD). It probably isn’t something that will be on every replacement display but it is a quality control issue to keep an eye out for.

The home button is also not exactly the same - if you look at it from an angle, you’ll see that the surface doesn’t have same curvature and smoothness of Apple’s home button (it’s a little less curvy). In addition, our home button had a little lumpy imperfection near the edge.

As with most aftermarket parts, the plastic border of the front and back are not perfectly cut and have a bit of plastic trimming on the edge. The texture of the plastic is also not the same as Apple’s part, as we found with iPhone4Parts’ white back. More important than the texture is the thickness of the border and we found this microscopic difference in edge elevation to cause slight incompatibilites with certain cases. Whereas the Incipio Edge slid right on prior to the conversion, it took a great deal of effort to pry the case off after our iPhone turned white. So if you use any tight fitting slider cases, beware of the RapidRepair part.

Moving on to the back of the phone, you’ll find that the camera flash diffuser is present and functional. There was some strange warping on the edges of the camera lens although as far as we can tell, it doesn’t affect camera quality a whole lot. There is also no UV filter coating on the lens.

All text and logos are accurate, in the correct size, font, and location.

We also didn’t have any issues with the converted 30 pin dock connector and headphone jack, although it did seem as if the dock connector were a bit tighter. Warranty RapidRepair repairs come with a 90 day warranty on parts and labor, 30 days if you installed the parts yourself.

Overall

All in all, we’d say RapidRepair offers a pretty solid service. The turnaround time using UPS Ground is painfully slow, the service could be a little more personalized, and there are some issues with part quality but RapidRepair definitely gets the job done. If you plan on buying their replacement parts to install yourself, just make note of the differences we noted in our review. If you don’t care much about some minor differences, then you’ll definitely be fine.

Pro’s

• high quality display 
• accurate logos/print
• professional repair

Con’s

• quality control issues, shade of white is incorrect
• slightly reduced image quality
• slow turnaround time

Where to buy

RapidRepair — MSRP: $149.99

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Our sponsor this week is UserReport, an app that makes it easy to find out exactly how your visitors are using your website and what they would like to find in it. Whether you’re running a blog, news site, or a complex web app, you can use UserReport to help make your website much more effective.

UserReport lets you find out detailed information about your visitors, just like other analytics apps. It then goes far beyond most other analytics sites by letting you see exactly how people use your site. You can get usability reports on your site directly from UserReport, complete with heat maps and demographic information.

Then, if you want to go even further, you can create surveys directly from UserReport to get your user’s direct feedback on your site. It’s nice to see automated analytics and data, but hearing your users actual opinions can be very helpful in making your site the best it can be.

Go Get It!

If you’re needing a better way to learn about your website’s audience and create customized surveys for your audience, give UserReport a try. It’s currently 100% free, and it just might help you improve your site and business. We’d love to hear how it helps your business if you give it a try!

Today I am extremely proud to present to you Showcase, a brand new web design directory brought to you by WebDesignDev.

What is Showcase? It is a visual directory that allows any web designer or company from any part of the world to list themselves and be exposed to thousands of potential clients.

It works like this:

You need to register at http://www.webdesigndev.com/showcase/registerfolio.html.

Step 1. Fill out your details (takes 1-2 minutes)

Step 2. Click Save and continue, and publish your listing.

So what are you waiting for? Add yourself to our web designer directory and start getting more clients!

Add Your Listing To Showcase