Enjoy my art!

This is a late post, and I’m sorry, but I had a choice to make.

I chose one interface to interrogate, and then realized that it was just way too much for me. Since Monday, I have decided to choose Sumopaint, which is basically a website that works as Photoshop, inside your browser. That’s pretty awesome. I chose this site because I want to see how it stacks up to Adobe. I have yet to really delve into it, but, not only can you edit pictures, but you can also paint, like in Microsoft, and that is wonderful.

The application that I decided to use as the subject of my second project is Storify. This application is a great journalistic tool. Storify lets you gather social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to help tell a story. Users can drag and drop posts from any of these social media sites, as well as insert their own text into the story. A great feature of this application is that users can edit their stories even after they have already been published. This allows users to keep their stories as up-to-date as possible. Published stories from Storify are also very easy to share with the public. Stories can be shared via Twitter or Facebook, but they can also be easily embedded into a site such as WordPress.

Storify will be an interesting application to research. I decided to make this application  the subject of my second project because I feel that I could use it to tell an interesting story in a professional and interactive manner. It’s also a very common tool used by various journalistic sources.

I was drawn to the application “750 Words” because of it’s simplicity and usefulness. I’d looked at some of the others and decided against them because, frankly, while they seemed useful to some people they didn’t have much potential for practical use in my own work. This application allows for the daily spew off thoughts that is beneficial for anyone trying to get their thoughts sorted at the beginning of the day. While interrogating the interface for this application I’ll be looking at the advantages of such a simple interface and how the constraints of the application can ultimately be it’s strongest asset.

For Project 2 I was lucky enough to get my first choice, a website called Popcorn Maker. It is a web tool that lets you add media, like YouTube videos, music files, and 3D images, and edit them in the tool. It allows you to cut, edit, paste, and loop YouTube videos and also has features for video filters. It is essentially an online version of Windows Moviemaker, which I am very familiar with and enjoyed using for projects in the past. This website seems like a cleaner and simpler version because you do not actually have to save anything to your computer. Rather, Popcorn Maker lets you add the url of a YouTube video and you can immediately start editing the video. It also lets you add any song from SoundCloud, a popular music sharing site, making this a very simple tool that lets you legally create a video with copyrighted music. There are also links to add images and other HMTL5 code, which I think are also very useful features. While this site has a simpler interface than MovieMaker in my opinion, I think it is also much deeper because it allows any form of media on the internet to be instantly dropped into this media editing tool. The ability to add 3D images, links to pages, and 3D models sets this web tool apart from other media editing programs that I have worked with in the past.

So today was the beginning of Project 2. I decided to go with Prezi as the tool/website that I will focus on. I choose this for a couple different reasons, the biggest being that I was familiar and comfortable with it. I have used Prezi one or two times but I am no where near an expert, and in fact I am absolutely terrible at it. I wanted to use this project as a tool to become better in an online tool that I feel will help me in the future. Prezi is a great tool if used correctly, and by the end of this I hope that I feel comfortable enough to the point where I can use Prezi instead of regular PowerPoints. Another reason I chose Prezi was because of all the customization and different modes of communication that were present on the website. There is so much to talk about on Prezi and this project will give me the opportunity to do so.

I am excited to get started on this project .I was a little nervous at first but now I am ready to tackle this head on and not only learn more about Prezi and what it offers, but also all the other websites/tools that are out there for me to explore and use. This is a great opportunity for me to become an expert in a website that can be extremely beneficial if used effectively.

I got my first choice (hooray!), which is CodePen.io.

As I understand it, this site serves as an online coding platform that allows users to write, edit, and preview code easily, hopefully eliminating some of the limitations of coding in a basic text editor.

I wanted to interrogate this interface to help cultivate my juvenile interest in coding and website construction. I think it is a great opportunity for me to expand my own horizons and skills, as well as publish some helpful information for readers with similar interests. I’m looking forward to exploring CodePen and analyzing its value as a user interface!