Tag Archives: app

Made another contest app for a client

Leave a reply

Sometimes I make contest apps for Facebook for my clients at work. This one is using a template and looks nicer than some others I’ve made in the past (I’d used the client’s colour scheme previously, which didn’t really look good in this format). The picture slider feature is pretty cool, I’m probably going to use those more often in the future.

Toplock ALT Tower app contest

 

The contest is for TopLock Locksmiths in Northcote who are a 24 hour locksmith company servicing all around Melbourne. The contest is for one of their clients ALT Tower Serviced Apartments, who are one of their clients. The winner (automatically generated from a database of entries) will get a night away in a luxury apartment and can do whatever they want in the city and come back and stay there for the night. I think the contest should do well as it should appeal to most people, everyone wants to stay somewhere fancy every now and then right?

For some weird reason I had a lot of problems getting the Facebook ads to work. It appears as if the filtering for ads on Facebook isn’t very well organised. I kept getting error messages that made no sense to how  was running the contest, I made appropriate changes to remove use of the word “Like” from anywhere (their filter seemed to think I was telling people to “Like” the page to enter, when I had said you must like the page to be able to enter). Though I’m still sure I hadn’t done anything wrong (Like gating to have fans enter a contest app is the correct way to run a contest rather than those dodgy “Like this photo to enter” contests that most small businesses do which actually violate Facebook’s terms and conditions). I also kept getting emails when my campaigns were rejected that showed a blank space where the error message was meant to be, so it was hard to fix. In the end I made an appeal to Facebook and showed them that their filter was screwing me around and they approved my ad. Still quite sure this was an error by them the whole time as I’ve made many ads similar to this in the past without a problem.

The thing that confuses me most is that how could a link to an app be confused with “liking this picture to enter the comp” style contests that other people do?  Oh well hopefully Facebook fix how their filter works. The contest framework I used is quite popular with Facebook.

I just really like Bacon Deluxe Burgers from Hungry Jack’s OK?

4 Replies


Keith with Hungry Jacks Bacon Deluxe

 

On my Facebook page there’s some kind of joke going about how I really like Bacon Deluxe burgers from Hungry Jack’s. Well I guess it’s not really a joke because they are probably my favourite burger ever and I’m sure I eat them more than once a week and have a habit of posting pictures of me eating them sometimes. Above is a photo of me holding my first Bacon Deluxe Burger of 2013. The first of many. I made this photo to commemorate that special moment. The photo got over 200 likes as well which wasn’t too shabby.

Keith Bacon Deluxe eyes

Above is picture of me that I pasted on top of a picture of a cat against an optical illusion that I saw in my Facebook news feed. I figured it would probably look better if I switched the head for mine and added Bacon Deluxe burgers over my eyes. I thought maybe this picture would make a good cover photo and would encourage people to buy them for me. It didn’t really work though. Someone bought me a McFlurry recently but that’s totally different.

McDonalds Hamburglar unemployed

This picture was made with two uses in mind, the initial Instagram photo for the POW! Fridays Instagram account to promote a dress up night in 2012 (can’t remember what theme it was) and then also to go with my article about the Hungry Jack’s Makes It Better App for iPhone and Android. I wrote that article a while ago but haven’t shared it or this picture on Facebook yet, I’ll do that today, hopefully people understand it. The joke is to do with how a lot of the old McDonald’s mascots are all gone and that the Hamburglar is now unemployed and uses the Hungry Jack’s app to get his burgers. I guess it’s kind of like a political cartoon but in a photo. Political cartoons aren’t really that funny. Oh well.

Slow Shutter Cam + InstaEffect FX app tutorial

Leave a reply

Keith display photo

I currently have this as my display photo on Facebook. It is really tacky and pretentious, but people thought it was cool and had trouble reproducing the effect, so I’m making a tutorial I guess. I’ll explain the process of how I made the photo, but I would not recommend the exact same order I use, since I took the original photo sometime before I downloaded the final app used to make this photo and hadn’t originally intended for this photo to exist the way it does.

What you will need:
An Iphone 4 or newer (I used an iPhone 4S)
Slow Shutter Cam $.99
InstaEffect FX free
Instagram free

First I used Slow Shutter Cam which is one of my favourite iPhone camera apps, I fool around with this app a lot. It’s 99 cents, but totally worth it. Go download that now I guess and follow along.

Slow Shutter Settings

When you open the app it goes straight to the camera mode. I don’t know what the default settings are, but  here are the settings I settled on ages ago (I never adjust these anymore, I’m happy with them like this). To access the settings here click on the aperture logo (bottom left button) and change them to Automatic and 2 shutter speed. This means that once you click the camera/photo button (bottom centre) it will record frames for two seconds. I usually like to turn my head in photos to get some kind of moody album cover effect. I might post some other pictures like this that I’ve taken in another post later, cos there’s a lot of cool stuff you can try.  In the originally photo I was laying down looking up in my bed. I like doing that because it gives me a flat colour in the background, you can also do it against a wall or something.

adjust blur

Once you take your photos, you use the top slider to move between the start and end points and stop the slider on a position that looks cool, I also increased the exposure in the original photo to make my skin look clear and pale. Once you get the picture looking the way you want it to, click the save button on the bottom right.

I then posted the photo to Instagram. I’m not sure which effect I used but it might have been Hudson, though my favourite is Lo-fi. This step I’d suggest you do last instead.

Keith blur

Above is how it turned out. This is the photo I inserted into the next app that I used. InstaEffect FX by monkeyX crops the picture to a square for you anyway as it is meant to be used before Instagram, so just use first ok? Select your photo when the app opens and then you get to choose some effects for your photo. Press the button that says “Effects”

effects

I used the middle effect on the second row. There are several pages of effects to choose form, but they get progressively worse. Also note there are ads in this free version of the app (which is what those “quest” and “battle” buttons are. Ignore those.

 

effect being used

Here was probably a good place to stop, but I also used the “DrawFX” button and drew a blue scribble on the picture

scribble

The blue I used is the default colour, I think I used the default size as well (you can choose colours and size at the bottom, slide across to access more colours) I kinda traced the shape of my head in the original pic, in the example above I just did a scribble.

After this I would then export the photo and put it on Instagram and then maybe add another filter and then post it on Facebook as your display photo. The slow shutter effect is kind of wasted on the final product, but  it’s what I used, I’m sure other apps will let you make the picture look over exposed as well, but that app is worth getting regardless. I hope this helps.