Christopher Kirby | What Am I Doing Here?

October 11, 2013

App Review: TouchCast

I love it when apps get me excited, and Touchcast has me all sorts of excited! It’s an app full of possibilities and potential.

At its most basic level, Touchcast is like having a television studio on your iPad. Not only can it shoot video, but you can insert graphics in real-time as you’re recording. That’s huge! Typically you would shoot your video, then import the footage into your computer and use editing software to add your lower thirds, over-the-shoulders, etc., before exporting the finished movie file. Touchcast can potentially eliminate the need for post-production work, seriously speeding up workflow.

And did I mention it’s free through the iTunes store?!

October 2, 2013

Book by FiftyThree

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this!

I love the Paper app by the same company, and when I first downloaded it I thought, “Boy…, wouldn’t it be great if you could order a printed copy of the books you create using this app?”

Well, I guess someone was listening. Or maybe that was their plan all along?

August 26, 2013

North Haven News Now Available on Flipboard

I’m excited to announce that in addition to the website, North Haven News is now available as a Flipboard magazine! This is something I’ve been working on in the background for a couple of months now, making sure I could keep up with the curation process before announcing it to everyone.

For those of you unfamiliar with Flipboard, it’s an app available for iOS and Android that gives you an elegant and visually beautiful way of browsing content curated from the web and your social networks. I gush about it in a previous blog post, so it should be of no surprise that I would evetuanlly bring North Haven News to the platform.

August 23, 2013

The MacDaddy Teaser

Trying to push this new video podcast concept to the next level, I created an animated show open that would run at the front of each episode. I wanted there to be no doubt who these tutorials were being aimed at, and I think this animation achieves that in a fun, visually interesting way. With nods to Apple products – from the “powering up” sound effect at the beginning, to the stripping of the “genius” factor from the black t-shirt at the end – hopefully I’ve gotten across the message that this is a show geared toward the everyday Apple user and their families.

August 13, 2013

The Birth of a Video Podcast?

My first blog was about my years as a stay-at-home-dad. Blogging was just becoming “a thing,” and Blogger made it easy to publish your own site. I found my niche in a great little SAHD community and maintained the blog for 5 years. Eventually – after my youngest entered kindergarten and I returned to a day-shift and thus couldn’t really call myself a stay-at-home-dad anymore – I stopped posting updates and the blog went dormant in April 2011.

At the same time, I had started North Haven News after falling in love with the video podcasting format. As mentioned in a previous post, North Haven News is still around, but not as a bi-weekly video podcast.

Recently I’ve been playing around with the idea of launching a new video podcast, but unless I can come up with a unique take on a subject, anything I do will feel like a waste of time. I love to bake and I experimented with a couple of cooking videos, but everyone under the sun has a cooking blog. I also love my Apple products, but tech podcasts are a dime a dozen.