Now we play the very active and fraught-with-spruiking-and-content-generating waiting game.

One of many things I’ve been gradually whittling into reasonable shape over the past few months is a new informational blog to coincide with the launch of the iPad entitled iPad Apps Buzz.

The premise of the site is to provide quality-over-quantity reviews on iPad apps to attempt to counteract the huge amount of semi-useless apps on the App Store and help readers to sift through the might-have-beens to find the must-haves. The idea developed organically from a need that I wanted addressed – namely, the App Store Top 10 doesn’t so much introduce you to hidden gems as it does give the same apps everyone else has. Even then, the top 10 doesn’t often even contain compelling apps – at least none that compel me.

The fork of logic that comes out of this is, I’m a person like me (!), there’s bound to be others like me. Disenfranchised by an App Store where the apps with workmanship and serious utility are a chore to find. Apps like Mixr that make you say “Hot damn, I actually need to buy one of these, instead of watching from the sideline.”

Thus, this site was born. At the moment I’m trying to find regular contributors. If you’re interested in writing for a fast-growing essential information source on the iPad, email me at james.eunson@gmail.com and we can get started.

I was for some reason following the philosophy that maximising the number of people I was following would result in reciprocation and everybody increases their follower count. Mutually beneficial arrangement right?

Theoretically, yes. Sadly, following people with wild abandon doesn’t actually garner you quality tweets to read. Surely this sounds like an obvious lesson but as with many of these type of situations, understanding only comes with actually experiencing it first hand. Gradually my tweet-stream (or whatever it’s called) became filled with affiliate marketing and “social media guru” noise. Of course, there are legitimate purveyors of this type of material on twitter but certainly the signal-to-noise ratio is not good. With so many variants and re-hashes of “Top 10 ways of being completely awesome in social media” posted, it becomes a uniform wall of garbage.

For a short while I actually considered just abandoning the whole thing, but after reading “Crush It!” by Gary Vaynerchuk and the enormous importance he places on his twitter account I decided to give it another shot. After roving around for a while, investigating what kind of designs and content people are pushing in 2010, I realised my twitter page was in desperate need of a facelift.

So, after a brief time passing montage and some very determined facial expressions I came up with a light, airy sort of a redesign of my twitter page. Behold – it’s greentastic:

Next steps: get a headshot of myself up there. It makes me more relatable, or so I’m told.

Anyway, with that cleared out I’ve moved three new pieces up there. The first and second are the result of me importing some Illustrator messing about I did in my (amazing) Visual Communication class into Photoshop and letting loose. Like I say in the creator comment on deviantart – they may or may not be too busy, but I guess that will become apparent in time when more people comment!

Next, I was really neglectful of uni last weekend, locked myself in my room (stop laughing) and bashed away at the keyboard until I came up with a little something I like to call ‘Sentient’. It’s the most together thing I’ve done so far, that is, everything before now has been held together with digital sticky-tape and sheer willpower. But I can actually look at the sequence of this music and zoom in and zoom out at my leisure. So the third and final piece I have to blog about is actually two-pronged – music and accompanying artwork.

Sentient

I made the image initially in 4:3 format 800×800 pixels for album artwork, so there was something to look at in iTunes… Then I decided to post it to youtube in eye-shatteringly large 720p, so I had to adapt it to 1280×720 format which I dare say came out better than the original…

The youtube version of it is here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSEqbEBtWVo&feature=channel_page&fmt=22.

This is my first genuine, certified content post on this website so the pressure is on. Thankfully, I can announce today that the site Learnex.net for all intents and purposes is finished. Of course the site isn’t 100% yet as it lacks the most important ingredient – the demo that it was designed to advertise! Indeed, it’s true – if you were to head over there now you would notice that in attempting to download the demo via that attractive yellow button on the middle left (and providing you have javascript enabled,) you will be met with a low-tech alert message stating that it’s not quite finished.

This is unfortunately the case – it’s currently verging on completion but there’s still the process of converting the version of Writing Skills I’ve been working on with integration to the server backend stat tracking program into something any random person can jump straight into.

I’ve consciously tried to avoid having a signup process, e-mail confirmation, etc in this demo because it’s essentially throwing up unnecessary walls in front of any potential user. The plan at the moment is to demonstrate the stat system at a later date in a subsection of the learnex site, plus, the demo doesn’t focus so much on assessable content tracked by the stat system anyway so going through the rigmarole of registration only to have all of one exercise tracked would be a little underwhelming to say the least.

Anyway enough talk from me – the plan is to have the demo released sometime over the weekend and you’ll hear about it the instant it goes live from this site. Other methods of staying in the loop are subscribing using the link above right, signing up to the Learnex mailing list using the swanky form on Learnex.net or following me on twitter – @jameseunson is (unsurprisingly) my username. Each of those sources will be updated as it happens so pick a system and I’ll hopefully see you on release day.

UPDATE: The project has been put on the backburner for now. Further information as it comes.

As an aside, the theme creation mechanism is also pretty easy to grasp once you get your head around it. By far the best resource for it is http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/ – an epic tutorial spanning 16 pages, covering in painstaking detail the process of creating a theme. Props to Small Potato, author of the tutorial and former admin of the wpdesigner.com site before it started to circle to proverbial bowl. Combined with the resources a simple google search yield on the subject, creating a theme is much easier than it otherwise would be.

The content for all pages is complete – it’s pretty brief but I don’t want to fill an entire site talking about myself – the purpose of this blog is more sharing information than ‘Dear diary today I had a chicken sammich…’ etc, and the purpose of the work pages is just to give a brief overview of the thoughts, goals and any future intentions for each of the projects listed. The idea is to give a little context to each project and help further understand them, if the reader is so inclined. If they aren’t then the power of not-reading-prerogative is quite conveniently at their disposal.

Thanks for visiting and stay tuned for some quality stuff.