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Tag: journal

Photo Journaling with Pressgram 2.0

Driving home from work yesterday thinking about all the new features in Pressgram, it suddenly struck me that two new features, Drafts and multi-photo attachment, when used together turn Pressgram into a photo journaling application. This makes the changes John added a more powerful than at first glance.

Let me explain.

A photo journal is series of photos that chronicle a person's days, trips or special events. It is a way of keeping chronological memories of an individual's events. Photo journals may be kept in different ways depending on the person.Ask.com

The original Pressgram functioned more like Instagram with a WordPress publishing option. A great combo but maybe not what John had in mind. Snap a photo, apply a filter, publish. If I wanted to post a series of photos, with the old version I created a new Pressgram post for each one. I could use this for photo-journaling but the results are a bit disjointed. There was no way to piece together a series of photos in a way that told the story. Pressgram 2.0 changes that.

Now imagine that I'm out in downtown Philly hanging out with friends or family celebrating a birthday. Or maybe I'm traveling to Manhattan with my family for a trip to the American Museum of Natural History. We decide to hop on a train from Princeton Junction and when we get to the platform I launch Pressgram to snap a photo of the kids sitting on a bench, waiting for the next train. I title my post "A Day at the Zoo"1, add some descriptive text to the photo and save the draft. A few minutes later I open that draft, click the "Add a Photo" button and capture a photo of the train approaching the station. We get into Penn Station and I snap a photo of my wife and kids looking alarmed at the mass of human being while we walk to the find the subway train. My kids love riding the New York Subway.

I open Pressgram again and capture a few more photos of our subway ride. Maybe I capture some photos of the zoo animals getting on/off the train. We get to the museum and we visit the dinosaur exhibit, and the hall of Native Americans. I use Pressgram to add a few shots of my son standing in front of T-Rex. All of these photos I am adding to the same draft I started back in New Jersey.

A few hours later, before we are too exhausted, we walk across the street and take a stroll through Central Park. There are lots of trails and little semi-private nooks and climbing rocks. A bit of civilization the middle of the zoo. The kids are having a blast and I capture a bunch of cool photos to for my photo-journal. As the sun sets we get back on the train for a ride back to New Jersey. It's been a wonderful day.

On the ride back I open up Pressgram and edit my draft post. I revise the title, add some text for each phot and maybe edit my the photos to get the artistic effects I want. I add filters, change contrast and maybe add a frame. Then with a few more clicks I send my post to my blog, Facebook and Google+. I just created a photo-journal of my day.

I haven't used this as yet but, I think this is just one of the subtle but powerful creative features that Pressgram 2.0 brings to the user. What do you think of the new features of Pressgram? Do you plan on using Pressgram as a photo-journaling app? Leave me a not with your thoughts in the comments section below.

  1. A friend of once referred to New Yorkers as zoo animals due to their famed rude and obnoxious behaviour. ↩

Ohai!

Ohai is your journal for keeping track of where you've been and what you've done.

I "discovered" this app, which was built on the app.net, network a few weeks ago. It's software designed to keep a private journal of one's travels. I started using it a few days before a recent vacation to Virginia Beach. I used it on the drive down. We stopped on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel and I added a few photos and a few lines of text along with a photo.

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Sign-up
Sign-up

The app is simple to set up and use. I signed in using my app.net using the Passport app. You don't need the Passport app to sign in but you do need an app.net account.

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Check-in
Check-in

After that Ohia! displayed a screen with the date, a map and a check-in button. This app is designed to be simple to use.

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Find your location
Find your location

Once I tapped the check-in button, a new screen was displayed with a list of places near me. The mapping function needs some work. I have no idea what backend database is being used but Ohai! didn't find places easily found via Yelp or Foursquare.

For example, it found the Trenton Farmers' Market but not the Button's Creperie inside the market. Fortunately, the developer has provided a way to add addresses.

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Comment on your check-in
Comment on your check-in

I added a photo to my check-in and a sentences describing my thoughts in the moment before submitting my journal entry. I can choose to keep my journal private or share with app.net or twitter. That's all to the app.

Ohai! is truly meant to be used for capturing the moment. There is no way to go back and edit an entry later or add text or images to a earlier entry.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

The Diabetic Jornal for iPhone and iPod Touch

Nial Giocamelli and I have something in common. He has Type 1 diabetes. Like me, his brain now needs to do the work that his pancreas and endocrine system used to do. He has to calculate the amount of carbohydrates in each meal, compute the correct amount of insulin he needs, test his blood glucose, and inject that insulin.

This is part of diabetes management. All this data on what we eat and when we eat and what dosage of insulin we took and what the blood glucose is at any given time is useful when we visit my doctor. It can be used to adjust treatment or just to make sure things are under control. It's a lot of data.

A single entry for breakfast involves knowing the amount of carbohydrate, the BG reading, the insulin injected and the time of day. There are a few apps in the iOS App Store for entering this data but it's a manual process. Very few of them have any graphing or charting and there is no easy way to share the data with the doctor. They are difficult to use, ugly and expensive -- anywhere from $2.99 to $.799. They don't learn user habits or provide any real analysis. in my opinion the apps in the App Store are no better than a digital version of pen and paper.

Nial wants to change all that. Imagine if an app could use my diabetes facts to suggest a reduction in dosing because it knew that my blood glucose drops just before lunch based? Imagine if that app understood that since I ate pizza that I might be in for a roller coaster BG effect in a few hours? Imagine if that app was FREE?

Most of the existing diabetic applications on the App Store make it tedious and difficult to keep your journal up to date. After all, my disease takes up so much of my life already that I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary recording data. So I built my own diabetic journal application, and I made it fast. More importantly, I made it intelligent.Nial Giacomelli

Features include:

  • The ability to track and report on daily athletic activities, meals (and carb intake), as well as medication and blood glucose readings.
  • A system which monitors your medication schedule and intelligently pre-populates fields to save you from monotonous typing!
  • A blazingly fast autocomplete system.
  • Fully internationalised, with automatic BG unit conversion between mg/dL and mmoI/L. The journal works everywhere.
  • Medication reminders (including a geofence that'll remind you to take your medication when you leave the house)
  • View entries across a rolling six month period or break it down by entries entered within the past 7 or 14 days
  • A fast and beautiful gesture-based interface

Nial hopes to accomplish something great with his app, the Diabetic Journal. He wants to make it so that everyone has access to top notch diabetes management software. I want to help him.

Nial has the support of noted web gurus Cameron Moll, Jeffrey Zeldman and others.

Unfortunately he is running into issues raising the initial capital to get the project funded. He has started a Kickstarter project to raise money but time is running out. Please visit the Diabetes Journal Kickstarter page and help fund this project.

Spread the word.