Category: Assignment

Back after AWOL

I’ve completely ducked out of DS106 for the last two weeks. Work, family and a week long conference meant I’ve not don anything for week 7, 8 or Week Nine: Remixing it Up — Camp Magic MacGuffin and didn’t do anything for the wonderful: Seven Day Daily Create Challenge.

I did see a tweet from Mike Berta inviting me to Radio campfire with stories and songs which I could not follow up. For the sounds of it: Digital Raconteur: Radio Campfire Show it was great. As I’ve been digging into Internet Radio at Radio Edutalk I would have loved to join in.

So I am going to try a few daily creates this week, I started yesterday:
Night fades into day
Two photos taken out my window with iPhone, layered and with a fade applied with photoshop touch on an ipad.

and I’ve made a quick one on the Remix Machine Tell A Tale On A Tapestry [remixed]: DS106-ersizing, whicxh turns out to be quite easy:

The Bildwirkerey von Bayeux looks useful: Create your own stories with the historic tale construction kit.


Hopefully heading for a slightly more creative week.

Here

Poetry Reading — MISSION: DS106 Poetry is meant to be read aloud. Select a poem – it can be a personal favorite or one you find randomly – and read it aloud. Explain in your recording why you chose that poem.

Lots of S sounds I am afraid.

I am reading a poem by my daughter about hillwalking.
An Caisteal and Beinn a'Chroin

Bobbie and Me

SongStory — MISSION: DS106

My memories fade over time, but sometimes there is a song that can take me back to a place that revives the memories of my past. The song allows me to remember things I thought I had forgotten. So, for an assignment, pick a song that does that for you, and tell some stories about what you remember…  …In the assignment you might want to mix your voice over parts of the song, give an intro, tell the story first and play the song, break up the song with the story – lots of options. But nothing too long – my attention span is short. These would be great to post on ds106 radio.

About two minutes, hopefully not too long.

bobbie and me

 

Falling short

After last week’s excitement, I have fallen a little short of my own expectations this week. I’ve not been near minecraft, didn’t even get started on the Design Safari. I manage one Design Assignment, the creative commons one and then tried the Lyric Typography Poster.. I saw a couple of great results (and this looks like something professional) for this and though it didn’t look too hard. I cranked through iTunes until I remembered one of my favourite song Judge Not, there are a few different reggae songs with this title but the one I like is by Dennis Brown:

The phrase I like is Judge Not, for we all fall short of the glory of Jah. I’ve taken Jah out of the quote as I am not religious. I like the idea of trying and falling short more than Judge not lest you be judged (Matt. 7:1).

I started thinking about this, googling King James font, I saw a reference to calson, so decided to go with Big Calson which seems to be on my mac. I was hoping to get a sort of old looking text and spent a couple of hours failing to get anything like my imagination. I did consider the old english type of font. I was also thinking for some reason about flags and decided on a flag background; red gold and green seemed obvious. Many tutorials and tests later I ended up with this:


This falls very short of the target: Choose one of your favorite lines from a song and illustrate it using only typography. Consider how the font, color, sizes and placement of the typography can reflect or emphasize the meaning of the words.

Nevertheless I have now spent a deal of time playing with photoshop and trying out various tutorials, hopefully this will help.
Here are a few of the tutorials I read through:

So I had another go:
I do not think I have much natural design sense. I have enjoyed and learned from other ds10ers design assignments this week.

My week 4 flickr daily creates:

Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery


And a soundcloud one:

 

Create Your Own Smartphone App

Create Your Own Smartphone App — MISSION: DS106

Although it seems like smartphones can do anything these days, every iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry owner can think of one thing they wish they’re phone could do. Well here’s your chance. Come up with your dream application and then create a picture that encompasses what the App would do. It could be something feasible or something completely out of this world. Maybe someone will even be daring enough to try to make your idea into a real app and make millions! Have fun with it.

A week or two ago I made a simple Remember to Create Daily web app for iphones. If I was a real developer I’d take this a bit further and make a TDC app that could submit to Flickr, youtube and soundcloud. It would let you pick pictures and photos from your camera roll and record audio directly.

The app would post and tag the media to the appropriate service. It would optionally post to your own WordPress or posterous (and anything else with an API). In doing this it might be that the DS106 organisers would encourage the use of a ds106 tag for things participants want in the main DS106 stream, this might not include the daily stuff.

Most of the inspiration for this comes from the MakeWaves app, this is one for school pupils. It is the only blogging app that allows you to post audio as well as the more usually supported images and video. I reviewed Makewaves on my main blog: Making Waves

I though I was going to bang out a series of screens for this assignment, the audio capture, the settings screen etc. As I started I realised that this would take a great deal of thought and many days. I just stuck to the first screen. I grabbed the icons from the Noun Project. These downloaded as svg files. I had to use Gimp to open these, I then copied them and pasted into Fireworks 8. Even this one screen could do with a lot more thought. The spacing and positioning of elements, choice of icon and workflows all would need careful consideration.

My other ideal app would be a journey teller, this would combine the above with a gps tracker and create a series of ‘post’ which would be placed on a map when published, (or viewed with maps in the post) I’ve messed about with such things before: Boos on a map and A Mapped Walk for example. But it is a fairly long drawn out process. I’d love to do this on the fly without having to do any work on returning home, again I’d like image, video and audio support. The app would have to be able to store the information when there was a poor or no signal.