It’s almost Christmas, but I didn’t have to wait to see Santa. In fact, he brought his elves to my house to dance. Well, at least that’s what I was able to make a video of thanks to today’s review of ReelDoozy, a pretty unique iPhone app.
What’s All This About?
ReelDoozy is an iPhone app that uses green screen technology to let you super-impose fun video they provide on top of your own video. The result is a video of, say, your own house with Santa dancing around in your living room. This green screen technology has been used for years in the television and film industry but lately, it’s turning up in all sorts of fun apps like this, thanks to the processing power and video capabilities of today’s smart phone line-up.
ReelDoozy Features And Improvement
When the app is fired up, the first thing to do in order to make a video is select a foreground video. This is the video of Santa, or whatever else you choose, that will be super-imposed atop your own video. There are four short clips starring Santa and his elves that are free to use. For most, these will be fine to play with, but the app offers six additional foreground video collections that can be unlocked for an in-app purchase of 99 cents per collection. While playing, I decided to buy the Dancing Pack to aid in the making of my review video below.
After selecting a foreground video, you select a background video or create one on the fly. So far, it’s been pretty basic stuff I had expected from the app, but the next step was a nice touch. With both the foreground and background videos selected, you can choose where to position the foreground subject and even pinch-zoom to re-size him. Better still, you’re given slider controls to adjust the brightness and contrast of the foreground video and can choose to use the foreground audio, the background, or a mix of both. Of course, this stuff is almost necessary if you want the final video to look good at all. I would have really enjoyed some kind of path selection to allow me to move Santa with the floor if my background video moves too much, but it might be a bit much to ask of a free app.
While I’m being greedy, I’d love some more selection in video packs. The dancing and humor scenes are fun, but I’d love the option for a couple scenes in which Santa is placing presents under the tree or filling a stocking. I’ll gladly throw down another buck for that.
Video of Santa Dancing
Sometimes the best part of a review is playing with fun stuff, so I tried to be a little creative and come up with my own videos with Santa and the elves and here’s the result.
Conclusions
When I first saw the press release for this, I thought it looked like a neat way to show the kids that Santa had actually been there. After installing and playing around, I realized it was pretty fun for those of us without kids, too. The price is always right when it’s free, and even the in-app purchase options were well within reason. The one stand-out problem with this app is that is freezes on me when finalizing a video. The video does save, though, so this is a minor inconvenience. In the end, ReelDoozy is a lot of free holiday fun, leaving you little reason to not check it out. If you try it out, I really want to see what videos you come up with, so share the links in the comment section below.
Bipper AS, a Norwegian tech company best known for Bipper, a parental control smartphone program, have come out with a new application that has already seen considerable European success: bSafe. The application allows you to immediately send out an S.O.S. if you find yourself in trouble while out walking at night. It does this by sending text messages and phone calls to a predetermined list of “Guardians” who function as your emergency contact and who are given a map of your exact location. This information can then, presumably, be passed on to the police.
The bSafe application, which available globally this week for both Android and iPhone users, has already hit select European markets. It has seen impressive success there, garnering media publicity and surpassing two of the most popular apps in the world – Angry Birds and Facebook – in recent downloads.
bSafe has proven that it can be successful, then. But can it actually keep you safe while walking at night? Can it give your phone a security feature besides a basic reverse phone lookup? Is it worth having as a last-ditch, security precaution?
The short answer, it would seem, is no. If you’re truly in a dangerous situation, calling 9-1-1 is probably easier and it is certainly more effective. Most cell phones allow you to program 9-1-1 into one of the speed dial options (usually “9″) and a police dispatcher can figure out your location even if you don’t provide one. Having a text sent to your best friend saying that you’re in trouble is simply not going to give you the same rapidity of response. Think about it; in this hypothetical situation, your friend will likely try calling you back first, just to make sure that you truly need their help. It is probably only if they don’t get an answer that they’ll call 9-1-1. Getting the bSafe app, then, can take away valuable time if you do find yourself in an emergency.
But the application does have some intriguing uses and possibilities, albeit not those that it originally intended. For example, it allows you to go into “Risk Mode”, which tracks your exact location by GPS and can then send that route to a designated computer. For people who want to go for a run and then see their route sitting on the screen when they get back, bSafe is an appealing application. Furthermore, the app’s general mapping and navigation software is accurate, fast, and easy to use.
So I might find myself downloading bSafe in the near future. But I certainly don’t plan to send out any S.O.S.’s – whether or not I find myself in a dangerous situation.
This guest post is by Nancy Evans. She is a freelance writer that specializes in tech and business.
Online video accounts for an astounding percentage of the internet’s traffic. YouTube, alone, sees about 48 hours of new video uploaded every minute and about three billion video views per day. Still, we find ourselves often looking to third party applications to handle video tasks our base operating systems don’t do – or at least not well enough. A good example of this is downloading video from sources such as YouTube.
Today, I spent some time with the Elmedia Player software and tried many of the features offered in the free version as well as the PRO.
Notable Elmedia Player Features
The free version of the Elmedia Player leaves out most of my favorite features, but that’s to be expected. I found, however, that even the free version is very well polished with a lot of options and advantages over most of the free video tools I see. Here’s a list of most of what you find in the free version:
- Support for many video types (FLV, SWF, XAP (Silverlight), RM and RV (Real), AVI, MOV, MP4, WMV, DIVX)
- HTML5 video support
- Zoom in and zoom out options for SWF and EXE (or APP) files
- Growl and browsers integration
- iTunes-like playlists and star ratings
The PRO version, offered for only $19.95 on Eltima Software’s web site, hones in on a few key features that the product is really designed for and delivers in those areas. While this software isn’t littered with too much fluff, there are a few extras that don’t seem entirely necessary (like video ratings). Regardless, they’re not in the way and, more importantly, they didn’t distract Eltima from doing a good job with the core features. Some of the PRO features include:
- Download Video – even RTMP streams
- Full-screen mode
- “Always on top” mode
- Make a screenshot of the current frame
- Convert file into series of images
Of course, downloading video from a wide variety of sources is the feature I’d pay for, but the screen shot and “Always on top” features will also come in pretty handy. Less needed, but great on occasion, will be the option that lets you take a series of images – I’m thinking animated GIFs here.
Hands On Testing
After installing the software, my first test (as seen in the image at the beginning of this review) was to head to YouTube and try to download one of my review videos. In the past, I’ve used plug-ins to download a video, but Elmedia Player takes a different approach. You paste the URL to a web page into the software and it loads the page like a browser. When it does this, it looks for any videos or links to them in the page’s content and makes a list for you to select from. I first downloaded just the video that I was after, but then I tried the “Download all” option which grabbed everything in site.
Tip: You may need to start playing the video in the preview page before it will appear in the list to download.
Once a video is grabbed, it’s listed under the Downloaded section, where you can pull up everything from just today or broaden the listing. The organization extends in a different way to the file folder structure behind the scenes as well. Here, a folder is created that is named after the page you downloaded from.
While this software’s core features are not that unlike some free browser plugins on the surface, the extra video formats it supports can be invaluable. Additionally, some of the browser plugins I’ve used in the past can be sporadic in their reliability. I haven’t used this software long enough to be certain it will stand up to the many challenges I have in store for it, but so far, everything indicates that it likely will. Finally, one thing that Elmedia Player will not do that the browser plugins do all too often is cease to become useful after I upgrade to the latest browser version or switch from one to another. Being browser-independent has its advantages.
Conclusions
Cons: The only con it that it’s not free – well, it is free, but the best and really useful features are in the PRO version. Pros: This is well-built software with some thoughtful extras, the price is low enough to barely be a factor, and it doesn’t care what browser you have or version. Want 15% off? No problem. Just use the coupon code JOE-TECH-PROMO when you purchase.
Don’t Have 20 Bucks? Win It Here!
That’s right. Even if you’re just a little interested, I have been given not one, but two PRO upgrade codes to give out to lucky winners. Just follow the entry instructions below and come back here next week to see if you’ve won! Entering is as simple as clicking the “Do it” link, following any instructions, and then clicking the “I did this” button. If you’re already subscribed to JoeTech.com via email or you already follow me on Twitter, you can skip right to the “I did this” button for those entries. Good luck!
Last Halloween, a friend’s kids wandered off in search of candy before the younger children and adults were ready. Their mom knew they were going, but finding them later had me a little worried. On top of that, it’s a lot less fun finding kids in a crowded mess of people in the dark than just taking the little ones door to door for candy. This is where Trick or Tracker would have come in handy.
Trick or Tracker’s main objective is to allow the parent to know where the child is when that child is old enough to go out door to door on his or her own. That may be the core focus of the program, but it has some pretty cool features to round the whole thing out.
- Locate a trick-or-treater with the touch of a single button on the parent’s smartphone.
- Messages can be sent to the child’s phone using a special code that is picked up and responded to via pre-set coordinates.
- The child’s phone will have a special “Where Am I?” button, and the parent’s phone will have a corresponding “Where’s My Kid?” button.
- Parents can program their phone to receive messages at regular intervals revealing exactly where their child is.
I imagine most parents would want the peace of mind that the instant location checking can offer, but the feature that intrigues me even more is the notifications based on pre-set coordinates. From the sound of it, you can be alerted if the child wanders off too far or into an area you don’t want them in. This is a great feature that I can see my sister using with her kids.
Only the child’s phone must be an Android OS phone. For the parent, any Google maps-loaded phone (including iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Phone 7) will work using a simple manual process that the developer identifies in the FAQs on their web site. I’d love to see the child app available for the iPhone, too, but I’m guessing hurdles exist with regards to a developer’s ability to access certain data on the phone.
Priced at $4.99, it’s not exactly necessary if you’ll be walking with your child every step this Halloween, but if they’ll be out on their own this year, Trick or Tracker seems like a pretty good way to give your child a little freedom without being completely in the dark.
