Dayn W Creative

A selection of companies providing broadcast or bulk email list management solutions and their pricing at 1000 emails per month:

iContact – $11.90 per month*

Emma – $30 per month

ConstantContact – $30 per month

CoolerEmail – $39.95 per month

eROI – (contact them for a quote)*

PHPlist – (free, but only for experienced techy types)*

Note that these are just the ones I’ve come across, and this doesn’t include setup fees. The starred products are systems I am currently managing for my clients.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Need to keep specific folders locked down on your Mac? Sure, you can use the File Vault feature of OSX, but that encrypts your entire home directory. And if you’re like me, some of the sensitive info resides on external hard drives. Solution? Encrypted disc images.

After realizing that File Vault wasn’t for me, I searched for mac folder encryption in Google. I found Penmachine’s Flickr slideshow on how to create a password protected, 128bit encrypted disc image. Bingo. Now, when I need those sensitive files, I just mount the image, enter the password, and the image works just like a folder.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Ken Burns is in town, and of course, I thought of the Ken Burns effect in the Mac screensaver options. You’ve seen this slideshow rotating picture slideshow a million times. You know, the one where each image fades in, slowly zooms and or pans about the picture, then fades to a new image. It really adds flavor to the pretty static experience of just displaying an image for a few seconds.

Building on that notion, there is a motion graphics trick where the artist can make it seem like the subjects in the photo are on a different plane than the background. Panning or zooming reveals the effect, because the scale and location of the 2 planes vary independent of each other.

Some call this the “3D picture trick”. Whatever you call it, it’s another use for new 3D for 2D features in Adobe After Effects and Apple’s Motion. I found a how-to on this from Adobe a while back, and thought I’d share it here. Photoshoppers, warm up the pen tool. The 3D Picture Trick (PDF)

Popularity: 16% [?]