Coolibah - Digital Scrapbooking for the iPhone

{I created an 18 minute long video (too long for YouTube and my blog) which you can view in the forum here. I hope it shares with you how awesome this application is and how easy it is to use!}

Bobbie and Scott are a brother and sister team who have been busy creating a new iPhone application for digital scrapbooking! Isn't that awesome!

Bobbie is a work-at-home-mom and has played around with digital scrapbooking in her spare time. She is a graphic and website designer focusing on the small business and the work-at-home-mom community.

Scott is the brains behind the Coolibah project. He is a programmer that is a complete genius! Without him, this whole project would be impossible. He came up with the idea and asked Bobbie to help him with the vision behind the design so that it would appeal to women and digital scrapbookers.

In addition, there are a number of Beta testers, me included, who have been giving suggestions along the way to make it fit into the niche of the digital scrapbooking community. It has been fun to watch the progress of this awesome application. I really think you are going to like it! At first, I was not so sure I would use it, but as the application has progressed in the developmental stages, I can see myself using it more and more!

Bobbie
The Nifty Studio - Web and Graphic Design Website
Blog
Girl Indie - a blog she writes with her best friend about indie women designers

Scott Means
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Coolibah
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The designs will also be cataloged onto the website. Designers can set up an affiliation with Coolibah to provide their designs. Your kits are downsized to 96 dpi for use on the iPhone application.

You can visit the blog to see a list of the current designers who are available on the application. What a great collection of awesome designers to open with! I understand that they plan to have 150 kits available when the application goes live.

A great way to build a sense of community with the phone is to join the Flickr group to share what you have made on the iPhone. I think it's a great place to see what awesome things you can do with this application.

Here are two that I have uploaded already with just quick playing.



And this one is the one I make in the video I am sharing with you.



Let's discuss quality of the final projects.

First, I want to mention that this application is not meant to be one where you journal on your pages. You know I am a big encourager of journaling, but the ability is just not supported on this application.

The layouts are easily exported so that you can share them online or by e-mailing them to friends and family. I think this is one of the main focuses of the program.

The exported layouts are easily taken off of the iPhone. The dimensions of the layouts are 1056 pixels by 656 pixels at 96 dpi. The industry standards for printing digital scrapbooking is to utilize 300 ppi for best printing, or 200 ppi at a minimum.

When opened in PSE, I see that the image is 14.667 inches by 9.667 inches at 72 ppi (which is different that dpi).

If converted to 300 ppi, the dimensions are 3.52 by 2.32.
If converted to 200 ppi, the dimensions are 5.28 by 3.48.

Standard smaller photo printing sizes are 2 x 3, 4 x 6, and 5 x 7.
Therefore, it is apparent that 5 x 7 is not an acceptable size for printing, but let's look at the other two sizes.

First, this is my layout brought in Photoshop Elements and placed on a new 2 x 3, 3oo ppi file.
You can see that the bounding box goes beyond the file size. This is a good thing because that means we are downsizing to print at this size. Anytime you downsize, photo quality is satisfactory. Anytime you upsize, the program must make up pixels to create the image and loss of quality is found.

This is the same file with the image downsized. You can see that the bounding box hangs over the image area slightly. Therefore, this size does not translate exactly into a 3 x 2 size, but is close. The choice is to either have a bit of the left and/or right sides cut off or to squish yourself and make yourself a tad bit skinner. It is do-able. I can imagine just printing the .jpg out of the iPhone at 3 x 2 would most often produce a satisfactory page. Your printer software setting can be made to choose to either "fit picture to frame" (which would make it skinnier) or to print as is (which would cut off parts) and your printer would make the adjustments for you.

Therefore, my conclusion is that the iPhone application results could be utilized to make small mini 3 x 2 brag books.

Here is my layout brought into a 4 x 6, 300 ppi file. You can see by the white space that it in no way closely fills the page. This would require a lot of upsizing that may result in a lack of quality.

Here is the same layout brought into a 4 x 6 at 200 ppi file. You can see that it is a little closer to the actual file size, but it still requires upsizing. When I upsized the layout, it had a little bit of hanging over on the right, the same as indicated above in the 3 x 2 size, so the same issues would exist.

It is my opinion that for some, this size might print okay. It depends on the eye of the one looking at the printout. The industry standard would say "no" to this size, but the untrained eye may feel that this prints just fine. My opinion of this size is that it should be left up to personal choice as to whether or not one could print at the 4 x 6 size.



I may do some test printing with these sizes later and share, but for now, that is my analysis! In this way you can see exactly what you can do with the program and choose your purposes, whether it be to create a mini brag book at 3 x 2 or just to share in the digital world through online sharing or e-mail.

Still yet, I must say I am impressed with the program and am amazed at what we can do on the iPhone! The drop shadows, although you are limited to one setting, seem to add an awesome realism to the layouts. The choice of kits and items to put onto your layouts is amazing. iPhones aren't meant to be able to do it all, but this application certainly does as much as I would expect to be able to do on an iPhone (and maybe even more).

The application was submitted to Apple at the end of August. From what I have read from others submitting applications, the wait to be accepted by Apple can be a long, painful process. We cannot predict Apple's progress, but can only hope that it is soon!