incredibooth app

when we lived in Cedar Rapids we use to go to the Kmart and take our pictures in the black and white photo booth. I LOVE those old photo booths! But you now see less and less of them and they need to have film and developing chemicals in them. Seems like it was out of order a lot.

But now with my iPhone I always have a photo booth with me. You get this in the app store and it is for the iPhone and iPad. This is a Hipstamatic product and I like their stuff. It shoots black and white and several different color choices. Quite fun.

You get this in the app store and I think it was 99 cents.

at&t customer service

Rae: I hope to make this my last post on AT&T. I am tired of talking about them. I am tired of paying them each month for sub standard coverage. To all of you not following our iPhone saga, in a nutshell we have 2 iPhones and no land line. Service has gotten much worse over the last year. I need a new phone very badly and my contract is up. John's contract goes until next August. I assumed that since AT&T can see our dropped calls and that we have called them at least 4 times this year that they would let John out of his contract.

What was I thinking?

Rae: After John's recent call it is now completely clear to me. This is all our fault. I had no idea that we only had to on occasion, sometimes for a little while receive a call outside of our condo. And that the fact that we can actually make calls most of the time from 2 locations (where we actually have a chair and it is near a window, so we have a nice view) should be a bonus. After all I work from home. Isn't that what it is all about, making your business calls from your bedroom?

John:  But Rae, their coverage maps "clearly indicate we have a 'best quality' signal at our location". And what really irritated me was after my last call I got an ASSURANCE from the Customer Service rep, that "they would resolve the issue within four business days and CALL me back". I emphasize CALL because they had been sending me texts. And I'm not a big text guy and think they are always trying to sell me something. Did they call? What do you think? Did they text? A tougher question but the answer is, NO! How's that for Customer Service 101?

Rae: And shame on us for not asking if the contract said that they do not guarantee coverage in buildings. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I was blinded by the iPhone.

And AT&T has proven to be quite the problem solvers. I think $180/mo. is too much money for sporadic phone service. More than one AT&T employee has had the innovative idea that we can reduce that $180/mo. by just reducing our plan minutes. Now why didn't I think of that? Several people at AT&T have offered this exact solution to our problem so I can only assume that would be a good idea.

John:  I do have to give credit to AT&T's training regimen. It's clear to me that everyone drank the cool-aid because the solution to our problem always had something to do with upgrading or buying something else. And Apple...listen to this!!! This AT&T rep told me, and I quote, "The iPhone is notorious for bad signal reception". That's when he took another sip of cool-aid and suggested I sell my iPhone on eBay and buy something cheaper...one of their (AT&T's) phones. (Folks. You just can't make this stuff up!)

Solution: John will have to pay the $185 fee to get out of his contract. We have a MicroCell that we paid nearly $200 for which I suppose I will ebay. John has a working AT&T phone that we will have to replace with a $99 Verizon phone. And I will get the brand spanking new iPhone... in white... maybe with a Kate Spade polka dot case.

Bonus: I will quit talking about AT&T. Well Reader I will quit boring you with my story. But I will gladly share my AT&T experience with anyone who will listen. An unhappy customer can tell an unlimited amount of people. And has the motivation to do so. I wonder why AT&T does not understand that? All we wanted was for them to waive the $185 fee and let us out of the contract. They will get their $185 and a whole lot of bad press.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The END.

Plz repost. Friends keep friends from using AT&T. 

2 wisconsin iphone apps

free app from the Wisconsin Department of Tourism. We hope to take a little Miata trip to see some Fall color and I think this app could be quite helpful. Looks like it is loaded with info... attractions, events, overnight and dining. We will know more after we've used it on a trip. If you are interested in a weekly color update sign up for the email every Thursday at www.travelwisconsin.com

 

And here is a Madison app. It cost $1.99. It is also loaded with information from hookah bars to tea houses and all in between. It gives you distance from where you are, cost and neighborhood. Looking forward to spending some time with this. Love the screen shot above. When we lived DT for almost a year this was our view. If we walked outside the Madison Mark and turned left this is what we saw.

beware whining...

Since I am on the subject of iPhones I need to whine a little. Actually I want to talk about extremely poor customer service. We came to town, moved DT and got iPhones and all was well. We had good service. We then moved less than 2 miles away to our condo. After a bit we noticed dropped calls. We then spent $150 on a MicroCell. That is a piece of AT&T equipment that we BOUGHT to try and get adequate cell coverage in our condo. That seemed to work for a while and now service is worse than ever. Anyway John spent 2 hours on the phone with AT&T trying to get them to let him out of his contract so we can switch to Verizon. Long and short of it is that is will cost him $200 to get out of his contract. And they are going to test our MicroCell and call us back.

In the mean time there are 2 chairs in the condo where we have to sit to make calls. That means I need to make business calls from the bedroom. Even there if I move to reach for something I drop the call. Oh and I desperately need a new phone. And of course if I get it from AT&T then the contract extends even further out. This is all so, so wrong.

 

new weather app for the iphone...

I've been thinking about getting a weather radio. Weather is more important to me now living on a lake. Weather is so much bigger here. We have no garage so twice when I knew hail was coming I have had to run out and blanket my little car and wrestle the car cover on to it. Plus if the lake gets high we need to pay attention to the lake rising and the sump pump working. But I didn't really want a weather radio squawking at me all day long. The 19th this $9.99 iPhone app was offered free to the first 100,000 people. So I got it.

It will only tell me about bad weather near enough to me that I should pay attention. (You do need to set it up by putting in your location and choosing which alerts you want.) It is called iMapWeather Radio and you can get it at the Apple App Store. It is available for the iPad also.  Even at $9.99 it is cheaper than a radio which I would have put somewhere. And would not always have a radio with me. The link below will take you to the app.

Sunday night we had severe weather and this app alerted me twice. And it gave accurate weather readings for what was going on at our location not all of Dane County or the surrounding counties. Nice.

iMapWeather Radio - Weather Decision Technologies, Inc.

Full Disclosure... I am an Apple Affiliate but I would have gotten this anyway. I have 2 other weather apps but think this one will be the best for severe weather.

top 10 must have iphone apps... and a few more...

This is a list by the New York Times... is is always fun to see what someone's top 10 is. The Google voice search function sounds interesting as does RedLaser and Star Walk... OK all of them sound interesting... This is making me think of the first Thanksgiving after we got our iPhones and 3 of us at the table had them. Any question anyone asked had us looking it up at the table during the meal... I hope we do better this year. If not I apologize in advance.

picture show iphone app crush....

This app is SOOOOOOO much fun. I am sorry Hipstamatic but my heart now belongs to PictureShow. For only $1.99 from iTunes you get quite a robust little app. The first photo is one I took on my iPhone. The second one is after I played with all the many options available.

Same here, top one is un retouched. (Before I post photos I usually lighten them in Photoshop.) This one has that old polaroid border.

Same here... but using the random button. The only thing I am not crazy about is the noise it makes when you use the random feature. I didn't notice it until John asked what I was doing while we were watching TV and I was on my 27th random photo. I assume if I dig around somewhere I can figure out how to turn that off.

Original...

These 4 were all done with the random button. Oh I see hours and hours of fun here. You can find more out here. I initially had some problems saving the photos. I upgraded my iPhone software and that did the trick. Enjoy!

There may be less posts this week. We were out of town this weekend and I am in the middle of a big project... I'll post when I can.

iphone app & pantone case...

If is used a iPhone case this would be the one. I love color and all things Pantone. You can pick from 8 colors and they will personalize the case with your name and logo for free. All this goodness for only $19.99.

When we got our iPhones we had good reception. Then we moved just a couple miles away and have questionable service. Basically we get dropped calls inside the condo where we make business calls. That is bad. There are solutions that we need to check out. In the mean time today I downloaded this free app called Mark the Spot. When you have a service issue you tap a button and a report is sent to AT&T. Now part of me wonders if I am having service issues how this report gets to them... but well it was free and I am going to try it.

hipstamatic... on the iphone...

Here is an app that is worth every penny and then some. I love the interface with the retro look and the retro photos. You can play with this forever. I wish I had one of the original cameras this was based on. The original app is $1.99 and each of the 5 additional sets of lenses & films are 99 cents each. A lot of cheap fun. You get this through iTunes, of course.

6 lenses + 7 flash options + 8 films = 336 different combinations. Yesterday I found photojojo.com which has a great guide to this very thing. You can look at the effects and choose the lens/flash/film combo you want to try.

This photo and the ones in last Thursday's post were: Lens- John S, Film- Blanko,  Flash- Laser Lemon Gel

My new Facebook photo was taken using the Lens- Lucifer, Film- Float and Standard Flash. As I said... lots of good cheap fun here.