Tag : apps

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and our little festive update to Holler Gram is now in-store.  

Welcome to Holler Gram Seasons. 

More screenshots below.

In March we launched Holler Gram, an app that turns your iPad into a glowing sign and simultaneously tweets into a predefined hashtag. It was perfect for conferences and we only did it as a bit of fun - which is why we are amazed that it's now been downloaded 45,000 times.

It's still being used by people all over the world and of the many fascinating uses people have found for it, the most humbling is from Australia where a group of teachers got in contact with us to say they'd been using the app to teach deaf children.

Are you one of those people who look at your phone in frustration every now and then, with the knowledge that there must be thousands of fantastic apps you're not making use of because you don't know about them? Fear not - here's Made by Many's list of the apps we're using more often than the rest at the moment:

Games/fun

Death Rally: This is the app for you if speed’s your thing.

Toca-Boca Hair Salon: Tim was the one who first introduced us to this super fun app that allows you to change a character’s hairstyles as if you were a (slightly warped) barber. Definitely one that kids will enjoy too, even if that last bit sounds a bit counter-intuitive!

Toca Doctor: In Charlotte’s words, ‘anatomical educational fun’.

2011 was my first time at South By South-West. Before I left I'd been given a range of advice, from drinking my year's quota of tequila in 5 days to avoiding most of the panel based sessions harder than I'd be avoiding healthy eating. It's passed in a whirl, with each day blending into the other until now that it's all over it feels like one helluva long day has just ended, not a whole week.

So did it meet my expectations?  Yes it did, and more. It was an incredibly stimulating, vibrant and inspiring experience which has left my brain spinning. But, because there has to be a but, my only issue was that it did take me a day or two to perfect picking out the good sessions to attend. I'd been warned to expect more breadth than depth, and to stay away from sessions that were too close to my day to day work, but I was initially tripped up by sessions which sold their topic very well in the programme and then turned out to be nothing more than an exercise in selling the speaker and his/her start-up/book/app during the session. If I'd wanted to listen to a marketing pitch, I didn't need to fly  10 hours across the Atlantic to find it. A good talk should put sharing value first, and self-promotion second.

Last week our new iPad app, the SXSW-themed Holler Gram, hit the app store. Today we’re introducing the Holler Gram to the world with a post on the design story and an in-person show and tell over a beer at MxM HQ this evening.

The Holler Gram is a cheeky, disruptive little number we’re calling “a physical messaging platform”. It turns your iPad into a glowing sign you can use during the sessions and parties of SXSWi 2011 this coming week. It’s fully wired up to Twitter and stacked with pre-set messages and a big numbers score-slider so you can unleash your inner armchair critic pretty much whenever and wherever you please. Intrigued? Read on...

Following up on Cath’s recent post about what Conor calls ‘application obligation’, I thought it would be interesting to see what apps people in the office feel obliged to use, and why. More interesting than the apps themselves (Twitter as a service took centre stage, as I expected), was the reasoning behind why people altered their behaviour to fit these apps or services into their lives, instead of the other way around. I’m presenting them below so you can read them for yourselves (in most cases I’m simply putting their words into the third person so as not to take too much away from the content – they make really valid points):

Cath's recent post about Mappiness , and my response, prompted me to think about habits. How we form them, how we break them and how, as designers of utilities and services, we can build our apps to encourage habits to form in users.

After all, don't we want the things we build to be adopted and used regularly by thousands (millions!) of people?

But we all know that is difficult. Apps that look great on first glance, are downloaded with a sense of eager anticipation but are abandoned in the fetid wasteland that is three screens into your iPhone a few weeks later are all too common.

Why is this?

When I got my iPhone, one of the first apps I installed was Mappiness. There was a bit of buzz about it in the office at the time. I was intrigued by the idea - to map your happiness over time - and also into supporting the research by LSE. It all seemed so easy. Mappiness pinged me twice a day between 8am and 10pm and I dutifully answered the 6 questions on my level of happiness, location, activity and company. 

So, ‘all this is well and good‘, I can hear you say, ‘but there isn’t much there that I didn’t know before’. Well, hopefully this will be interesting then:

For the health enthusiasts:

Cyclemeter ‘turns your iPhone into a powerful GPS stopwatch, giving you feedback and motivation to go farther, become faster, be healthier, and live longer’. Simon I’Anson at Made by Many is a keen user of this one.

Last week, we asked the people in our Twitter and Facebook networks for their top iPhone apps. The driving force behind this query was our observation that the majority of people we know own an iPhone, and yet a lot of people wind up asking their friends for recommendations of interesting or useful apps. Of course, the Top Apps section in the iTunes store is always there for reference, but the problem there is one of curation. At the end of the day, would you trust Apple or people you know who have similar interests to you, when you’re looking for cool apps? I don’t think it’s much of a contest really – the power of the network is much stronger than most of us realise: I’m sure more than one of us has seen our friends ask for recommendations from their network on Facebook, whether they are experienced users of social media (read Foursquare and Twitter addicts) or not.