Plane. Created on iPad.

Here’s a quick little track I created sometime last year, just found it. It was made on the iPad, in Retronym’s Tabletop app. Aside from normalizing the file and trimming the ends off everything was composed from within the app.

ifttt.com, my new favorite thing

My newest favorite thing is ifttt.com (If this, then that), a beautiful site that you’ll set up, get working, and promptly forget because it will just feel automatic. ifttt.com connects (in the background) all of your favorite web services and ties them together in wonderfully useful ways. Examples, you can create a recipe that changes your twitter profile photo every time you change your Facebook profile photo.

Some of my favorite uses of ifttt.com are to capture information in my most beloved of all applications, Evernote. Every time I favorite a tweet or star a google reader post ifttt.com takes over in the background and downloads the contents of that twitter or google reader post and places it in a new note, automatically, in my Evernote. I even set up an Articles notebook so it has somewhere to safely deposit the article.

Another favorite use, there is a recipe that takes every Instagram photo I post and downloads it to Evernote as well. You can just as easily take every Instagram picture and post it to an Evernote note, saved forever in your account.

Unleash 2012 message open

I had the opportunity to push myself out of my After Effects comfort zone recently. Looking at the Unleash 2012 branding it felt like a good time to take my own advice and commit myself to a legit project in order to learn a new discipline. And with that, I decided to dive into Cinema 4D.

I learned a few things in the process. First, rendering in 3D takes longer, plan accordingly. You can fake some things in After Effects (like the glows, color correction, so don’t waste precious time in the render engine). Also, though global illumination is quite beautiful and makes your renders look incredible it’s a time hog. I was able to avoid it with some trickery in the design.

But most importantly I was reminded of one of NewSpring’s core values, “you can’t do life alone.” I work with an incredible group of artists / designers. It was important to lean on their deeper understanding of Cinema 4D and learn from them throughout the process. Their wisdom and experience is invaluable and imperative in my learning and understanding.

NAAC disk

This diskette represents what was the entirety of our technology from the on days of pre-NewSpring. NAAC stood for “North Anderson at Anderson College,” which was an outreach ministry from North Anderson Baptist Church to the students of Anderson (then) College.

Funny how times change, that at that point not 13-14 or so years ago this 3.4 MB diskette held the *.txt files of our songs. And that’s about it.

Can I get that message on DVD?

One thing we hear often in the media department is the request for a DVD of our services. We don’t have an infrastructure to produce functional DVDs of our messages for a large audiece, but we do offer our messages via *.mp4 video download format.

The cool thing, an *.mp4 file can be authored to a DVD that will play back in a standard DVD player. You’ll just need to download the file to your computer first, then use a specialized DVD authoring program to create the playable DVD.

*** CAUTION: We are not simply burning the video file to the DVD. In order to play the video in a standard DVD player it will need to be AUTHORED.

First, go to any one of our series pages (start here) then click on a series. Now, on a series specific page (say, the Overwhelmed series) look at the bottom right of the page. You will see a series of links. Right click on the Video (.mp4) link and save it to your desktop. See image below.

Once you have the file downloaded to your computer, use a DVD authoring program to author and burn the file to a blank DVD. Since all systems vary here are some resources to help you.

As things often change, google “mp4 to dvd” as a good starting point.