I left you in the good hands of my 5th Podcastaversary Giveaway and Rafflecopter, while I was off and traveling about. Meanwhile, I entertained myself with playing around with a few new apps on my phone. So far, the big winner--in terms of coolness and actual usability--is Steller. (And no, I'm not an affiliate, so this is just a straight-up review and introduction!)
Steller is a really super-cool storytelling app for smartphones. Steller allows you to create online photo books, of a sort, called stories. You can create pages with photos, videos, or text, or a combo package. It has several very nice templates and several layout options for pages within those templates, so it's pretty simple to learn. It also has a social-networking aspect in that you can follow and be followed by other Steller users, "like" a story, and leave comments. A lot of Steller users are professional photographers so just scrolling through all the Steller stories available is wonderful eye-candy. I'm a particular fan of the travel-related stories. Gorgeous. There are also a lot of stories that are recipes with step-by-steps included that may be useful, although I haven't tried any yet to know how well that works in the kitchen.
When I first found it, I thought (of course), "This will be GREAT for documenting the process on quilts!" I've thereby got a Steller WIP on one of my quilty WIPs going on. Meanwhile, to learn the app and to entertain myself on my second trip that involved a ton of time sitting around in airports, here are the three Steller stories I've created to date.
Story #1: I had pictures from our vacation to Washington D.C. handy on my phone still, so it was pretty fast to throw together. I was just learning the basics so I didn't get fancy with anything--it's pretty straightforward.
In Story #2, I had other photos on my phone from fibers I'd recently acquired. I messed around a little more with Steller layout options on this one.
For Story #3, I had to wait until I could get on WiFi and download a few photos from one part of my trip to Burma. I only did a little photo editing and for some reason I couldn't download a couple of the videos I have related to this, so this one is still fairly straightforward at this point. I might edit it later to make it a little more whiz-bang.
Finally, Story #4 is the one that kept me entertained in airports. I decided I may as well kill time messing around with all the various photo and video apps I have on my phone--and I have a lot. So you'll see at the end I listed which ones I used in this particular Steller story.
Super-cool, right? Love this app. It's probably my favorite new app find of the year. I even got @carolewool hooked. Here's a link to one of her Steller stories. (She beat me to the punch on getting one done on a quilt process--mine's not finished yet! The project is taking me a lot of time to work through so it may be awhile...) I've found several people to follow--including one young man who is documenting his study-abroad semester in India, which is fascinating!
You can follow Steller on Twitter if you're not sure you want to actually sign up for the app yet--they tweet links to newly posted Steller stories (although only featured ones), so you can see what they're like. You can also set up a Steller account even if you never intend to create a story, and only want to be part of the network. It really is a beautiful app.
I use it on my iPhone (it's not available for iPad but I'm checking out similar iPad apps to decide if I like them as well); it's also available as an Android app. I really do suggest you check it out!
Keep an eye out for an upcoming post on my favorite photo editing apps. Like I said, I have a lot, but a few are standouts!