GeekwithEnvy

Social Media

Featured App: Whims

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Whims is a social media app similar to Instagram, except instead of photos, you create text.

Whims Detail

You start off by signing up and making a profile. Then you pick a style sheet, they give you so many to choose from. A style sheet has a theme based on people, such as Harry Potter style. There are two types of font in that style and three color options. You can choose which specific words you want to change to the second font choice, if at all. Other options are, alignment, text size and text spacing.

Afterwards when you click “create” there is another option called “add texture”, this will give your background a different look. You can choose from no filter, crumpled, rust, stationary, vintage, water spill, and notes. These can be layered all together and the more you click, the more intense the texture becomes.

Once you have perfected your design, you can add a comment or tags and share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, text message, and email. This will post to the Whims page, but there is an option to save as a “Private Whim” which will only save the image to your phone.

I love this app because it has so many beautiful styles for free, unlike other apps that make you pay for packages and different fonts.

Download for free from the App Store

 

Potter Stylewhims styles

Yahoo Homepage Gets a Makeover, Love it or Hate it?

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NewYahooSS

After a few years (four) of the same look and feel of Yahoo’s home page, we see some pretty dramatic changes, but not everyone is loving it.

The new look of the Yahoo homepage does feel a bit cleaner and seems like it will match up with the style of Windows 8 quite well. The new homepage offers up a sleek tile design that you can easily customize to fit your needs. Another noticeable perk of the new design is how the site looks on a retina display or any other very precise display, it’s much clearer. As with pretty much everything these days, Yahoo is also getting a bit more serious with social networking and invites you to log in with your Facebook account for further customization and social linking.

The user response to the new look of the site is mixed so far. I can’t get through the comment section of almost any post without someone posting a complaint about the new look. Users are saying things are too big or not displaying very well on their screens while others just don’t see why they had to “fix something that wasn’t broken”.

I am taking a more optimistic approach and I actually think that while it may not be perfect it’s a move in the right direction. Infinite scroll on the newsfeed  and the a better connection to social media are a few of those “right” steps. However, there’s just something about the new look that feels a bit out of place; maybe it’s just because it’s new and so much different than the last. I think Yahoo may have to update this look, maybe relatively soon, in order to add a better feeling of solid design while preserving what makes Yahoo appealing in the first place, perhaps more of a hybrid of old and new. How do you feel about the new look?

Myspace Ready for Round Two

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Remember back in the day when a little site named Myspace dominated social networking? Well, we all know the story all to well of how Myspace began to loose popularity while Facebook went through the roof but now it looks like Myspace might be ready for a comeback.

Myspace logo large

The old social network was innovative but quickly began to feel very sloppy and some Myspace pages were so bogged down with content that it took forever to load a page. Now, it seems that is all in the past as Myspace has a brand new look and I must say, are you ready for it? It looks really good. The interface looks really smooth and it looks like it will fit in perfectly with Windows 8 or any other touch based OS.

Facebook brought with it a very clean feel and I still like the way it looks even now but sometimes, if it can be done well, a media rich page that showcases you and what your all about can be really nice. When it comes to social networking these days, things seem kind of bland but Myspace’s new look feels different, in a good way. I hope this works as well as it looks and maybe we can see things start to shift again. I guess we will have to wait and see.

There is a new video that shows off the new site and all of its features and eye candy. You can check it out here.

You can also head to the new myspace website directly and see for yourself.