And now for a brief journey to whacko-land. It has to be brief, because it’s on the Vine, and lasts only six seconds.
Vine is the video arm of Twitter. You can send a video of just about anything but it can be only six seconds long. (It loops.) Can you possibly get anything across in 6 seconds? It turns out you can, but a lot of it is weird and some of it is incomprehensible.
Vine is a free app for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Install it and it’s showtime! Each day there’s a bunch of videos to watch when it starts up. There is some filtering of these videos by somebody somewhere because you don’t see any pornography. What, you mean some people send six seconds of pornography? Welcome to the real world.
Now these tiny clips do not have what we would call high production values, but beware: Watching America filming itself is addictive. There will be many people dressing up, showing off and making faces at dogs. Some people prefer cats, but it turns out dogs are funnier. But many others are quite creative,like the one showing a piece of paper bursting into paper cutout flames. Or the couch that eats a snack off the coffee table and then quickly returns to being a couch. Careful or you’ll miss it. Don’t tap on the “all posts” category if you want to avoid the occasional porn video.
What’s especially nice about Vine is the scrolling. The audio portion of the video doesn’t start playing till you scroll to that video. This allows a dozen or so to be waiting for you while you slide your finger to the next one.
If you wish, take your own six-second videos to share with the world. Or if you’re more of a viewer, tap the “follow” button to subscribe to someone’s video posts. (Andy Warhol said someday we’d all be famous for 15 minutes, but it’s down to six seconds now.)
DigitalTrends.com recently compiled a list of the “best Vine accounts” to follow. You can find it if you search on that phrase. You’ll also see lists compiled by Mashable.com and other blogging sites. Or head over to YouTube and type “Best Vine.”
REACHING MORE PEOPLE
We’ve sometimes wondered what time is best to post to Facebook or Twitter. We know you’re all anxious about that. BufferApp will take you there.
Once you sign up, you can post lots of items at once and let BufferApp distribute them throughout the day or days when they’re most likely to be seen. You can post from the BufferApp website, or make it a browser extension in Chrome, Firefox, or whatever you use to browse the Web. (If you already use a lot of browser extensions, think twice about installing more. They can slow your Web surfing to a crawl.)
BufferApp has a fun feature: a link to popular posts. We tried to watch a link to falling asleep faster, but we kept falling asleep and couldn’t get through it. Productivity tips from Star Wars were interesting, but we couldn’t find our lightsaber.
SPEEDING UP THE MAC
We often hear from readers with slow Windows computers. But what about Mac owners? Their machines can get slow, too. Let’s hear it for slow Macs!
Good news: The same free tool that works for Windows also comes in a version for the Mac. It’s called CCleaner and you can download it from piriform.org. We use it to clean out junk files. But better yet, it lets you turn off items that start up when your computer starts up. (Do you really need that thingy running in the background?) It turns off browser add-ons. Too much stuff running in the background is usually what slows down the computer.
In Windows XP through Windows 7, you can turn off startup items by clicking “start” and then typing “msconfig” (without the quotes) into the “run” or search box. In Windows 8, you can do this from the task manager. Use the right mouse button to click the strip onthe bottom of your screen and choose task manager from the menu.
MUSIC APPS
iReal Pro MusicBook Play-Along ($11 for iPhone or Android) gives musicians a backup band. It’s a favorite of the founder of online radio app Pandora. You get 50 practice songs, in categories like jazz, classical, bluegrass and film. Thousands of other songs can be downloaded for free. You can change the instruments, their volume and the key and tempo of the piece. Create your own songs by changing chords or copying and pasting measures.
iGigBook ($15 for iPhone/ iPad) lets you carry all your music with you on your mobile device: real books, fake books, transposing chord charts, and single sheets of music. The search engine lets you find the one song that you need among the thousands contained in your sheet music collection.
THAT’S DANCING
We learned about the Jamo app from a waitress who told us you don’t have to have a Wii machine or Kinect player to have your dance moves critiqued by a machine.
Install Jamo on an iPod Touch or iPhone and choose from Zumba, Bollywood and other dance styles. Some are free, others are 99 cents. When you go to the Jamo website on a computer and click “Login,” your dance instructor is projected on your computer screen. Hold your phone or iPod in your hand while you dance to get critiqued.
Jamo uses Apple’s built-in accelerometer to detect your movements. It’s not as accurate as the Wii or the Kinect, but it’s easy and fun. The app gives you a number score based on accuracy, but Joy noticed she started earning points even before she started moving. (Might be someone in an alternate universe.) Still, it was possible to improve her score through practice. We signed up for it through our Facebook account; it didn’t work for us using an ordinary email registration. The app also works with Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joy.schwabach@gmail.com.
Business, Pages 20 on 02/10/2014