LonelySandwich
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Peripheral Vision 005: Adam Lisagor on how an expensive video could hurt your Kickstarter campaign
"When I started, a demo video was a screencap vid," Adam Lisagor begins, "usually a developer or an engineer, badly miced, going [he grabs the lavaliere mic from his shirt and speaks directly into it, for maximum distortion] 'I'd like to show you my new CMS financial manager.' You watch his mouse go around the screen, and it's super boring. It takes up eight minutes of your time, instead of 30 seconds." A cursory peek at Sandwich Video offers some insight into precisely how far we've come on that front, a parade of short videos produced for companies like eBay, Rdio, Flipboard and Jawbone that bring professional-level production and a dash of humor to the proceedings. Though, as Lisagor explains, it's about a lot more than just creating something that looks nice. While his company has evolved a fair deal since the days of the earnest video caps, the spots still need to actually, you know, show people what the products do. "When I first started doing them, they were meant to be a demonstration," explains Lisagor. "They were meant to show the user experience, while adding a lot more pizzazz and sparkle. We don't take the route of focusing on shock / entertainment value. We take the opposite approach, where it's all about the product and being engaging enough to want to share." And besides, production isn't everything. After all, that fancy new video for your crowdfunding campaign might actually hurt your efforts in the end. "If you're putting yourself on Kickstarter, but it looks like your video cost $100,000," adds Lisagor, "there's a certain portion of the population that's going to take that as a sign not to donate to your campaign, because it doesn't look like you need the money."
Let your tweets incubate with Birdhouse for iPhone
Twitter is many things to many people. Some folks use it to keep up with friends or the latest news; others make it their primary tool for online coversation. There exists, however, within the throng of Twitter users, a group of people who use Twitter as the stage from which they deliver their own special brand of humor. For these types, a tweet isn't something that's typed and quickly posted a few seconds later -- it's a chance to make his/her followers chuckle. To that end, they take great care to ensure that each tweet is finely honed and worded to deliver the maximum amount of gag within the 140-character limit. Birdhouse is an application for these people. Dubbed by its creators as "A Notepad for Twitter," Birdhouse isn't your typical Twitter client. Instead of reading, replying to and favoriting your buddies' tweets, it focuses on composition. Got an idea for a really hilarious joke? Plug the idea into Birdhouse, then come back to it when you have time. Tweak and refine it until you've got just what you want, and hit publish. There's no hard limit to the number of drafts you can keep at once, and it maintains a timestamped history of all of the tweets you've published. You can rate each message using a 5-star system, and it also allows you to email yourself a complete list of all pending and published tweets in case you're staring at the business end of an iPhone restore and you don't want to lose that truly golden mom joke you've been working on. Birdhouse [App Store] is available now for $3.99US.
Found Footage: copy and paste on the iPhone mockup
lonelysandwich put together this short demo of how copy-and-paste might work on the iPhone (and it's the first parody I've seen since the music was released last week). The whole thing with the guy and the lips is just freaky in the beginning (and pretty funny at the end), but in between there's a short demo of how text could be selected and pasted using the multitouch surface on the iPhone.Is it just me, or is implementing an interface like this turning out to be harder than it looks? As easy as this mockup is, I really doubt Apple would go for something this complicated (there are multiple screens to go through, and it's somewhat intuitive, but just not intuitive enough for Apple, methinks). Maybe the reason Apple hasn't put C&P on the iPhone yet is that, as good as they are at what they do, they just can't come up with a good way to do it.Thanks, ratiosans!
