Instagrille 2.0

Instagrille on my desktop

If you love your Instagram, just like I do and would like to take the experience beyond your iOS or Android devices, and if incidentally you are a Windows user, then you definitely have to get Instagrille on your laptop/desktop.

There are already a couple of websites dedicated to the task of allowing you to browse through Instagram photos, but i'm telling you Instagrille 2.0 offers an experience that is quite unlike the rest. For one, the interface is neat and easy to go through, then you have the same features offered on Instagram such as views of your stream, your friend's streams, and popular photos. Liking and commenting can also be done straight from the desktop app with the addition of enabling user and photo searches in version 2.0. What's a big big plus though is that there's an option to share your and other people's photos to  Facebook  and Twitter along with the capability to save photos straight to your desktop! This is the feature I really love. Yes, Instagrille 2.0 is packed.

Of course you need an Instagram account to get started and post your photos, because if there's one thing this app is missing on, it's the ability to upload photos (Instagram's API doesn't allow it). 

You can get Instagrille 2.0 along with other desktop apps, for free, on Pokki.

The Path From Like to Love

Hold your horses. I'm not about to dish out romantic advice for your relationship woes. No, sorry, this isn't where you're going to find out the "thing" that can finally take your relationship to the "next level".

What you'll do find here though is about another kind of "like"; the one you yourself perform almost everyday when you see that status message about one of your friend's fantastic day on Facebook, or that picture of the awesomely-cute-i-want-to-pinch-those-cheeks-coo-coo-coo baby on Tumblr, or its derivative form on Twitter, the favorite.

If I still have your attention after having said that, then let me continue and tell you why.

Simple. One, because I downloaded this one of a kind app called Fish, that turned out to be a tap essay about what it means to like and love something on the the Internet today. And two, because i'm a notorious liker/faver/bookmark-er/read-it-later-er who's desperately in need of this so-called manifesto about liking and loving on the Internet.

A few things about the app: currently it's for iOS only, it's free, AND you definitely have to get it. I'll leave the finer details of why it's so good to people who have actually put in the time to write about that like this, this, and also this.

Now, let's go back to the question: What does it mean to like and love something on the Internet today?

Awhile ago I told you how i'm such a sucker for bookmarking and/or for putting stuff on Read it Later, well, in my defense (and I know you will agree with me on this), the Internet is just a treasure trove of cool, good stuff.

On any given day I can chance upon a couple of pretty neat links from my Twitter (always), Tumblr (so-so), and I'll admit not so much here, which speaks badly of my contacts, or myself, for the kind people I associate myself with, Facebook. And that's not even mentioning the things I find on individual websites that I peruse at least 3-4 times a week namely, The Atlantic, NPR, The Rumpus, Mashable, The Browser, Brain Pickings, Thought Catalog, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and the occasional feature done by GQ, Vanity Fair, and Fast Company on interesting people.

Is there any wonder why i'm such a goldfish?

Robin Sloan, the author of Fish, calls this barrage of content from the Internet as an endless flood and points out that we try to stay afloat by liking, faving, bookmarking, which is all good because in effect we're telling the writers of these things, the websites that host them, and our friends who see them that this something that we liked and faved is cool or smart and is worth their time.

In a way it's an efficient system where websites get a feel of what people want to see, which in turn translates to us viewers being given more of the content that we care for. Why memes, cat videos, and the like are so popular is beyond me, but i'm sure this is the same system that is at play there.

The problem though with this system, as Sloan observed and as i've seen in my own habits, is that more often than not the things that we like and fave get lost in the jumble of the hundreds of things that we like and fave, and eventually end up in obscurity. This is particularly true for my reading list on Read-it-Later (now known as Pocket), which by now is a staggering 1188 entries long. Add to that the ones I have on bookmark and the things I faved on Twitter, and you get a huge mass of links, a couple of which I haven't even clicked on. We rarely return to the things we like and fave.


Sloan hardly offers any solution to this (I will not even make an attempt), instead he gleans on what he calls a path from liking (w/c translates to forgetting) to loving, which he puts in this single phrase, to love is to return.

This got me thinking about my own reading and viewing habits off and on the Internet, and it made pretty good sense to me. The books i've professed to loving like The Client, A Little Princess, A Widow for One Year, among others are exactly the same ones that i've read at least twice. The same goes for music, movies, and essays - I go back to them again and again and again. 

Because when it comes to these things, liking and faving just aren't enough.


As corollaries to that definition he further offers that:

For me, on a practical level, this just means changing my attitude towards the things I like and fave. It means not getting overwhelmed and overexcited by the huge volume of wonderful things on the Internet, but instead keeping a level head as I remind myself of what I love, why I love it, and making sure that I give these things their proper due of attention and focus.

It's been said that anything less than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time, this may be talking about romantic love or other higher expressions of love, but I doubt if it would hurt to use this same approach on the things we do on the Internet.


Try it too won't you? And see if it changes how you read and watch in this age of endless content.

App I Love : UNIQLO Wake Up

I will start this by saying that I am not a morning person. There. BUT I do want to be a morning person because of some idea I read from somewhere that successful people wake up at 5 am, which I'm more likely to believe means that successful people have the habit of waking up at 5 am rather than the other way around, which is that waking up at 5 am makes you successful.

Anyway, the point is that I want to wake up around six or seven-ish, but currently that's an impossibly difficult feat given that I sleep around 2 am. But as they, sow an act and you reap a habit, so all I need is to take that step, which is why i've been setting up the alarm everyday.

The problem is so far, none of them have lived up to the task. Either I don't wake up at all or I get up to this shrill, irritating noise that just leaves me wanting to hurl objects at the damned source. Not a good way to start the morning i'm telling you.

Then came this video on my Tumblr dash about an app by UNIQLO called Wake Up and I was like, "sugar coated voice singing the time, day, and weather in the morning to some none shrilly actual music? I am downloading this!", and what do you know we have here a winner!



Truth be told, I was a bit skeptical at first if it would be successful at doing what so many before it had failed to do, but there I was on the first morning waking up at 7 am and actually feeling like my day was going to be full of sunshine and butterflies. Ok.. i'm going way overboard there, but it did actually make me want to listen to the music for a few minutes, which by the  time I got tired of it, I was fully awake already to even think of going back to sleep. Just make sure you have the volume on because it won't stop playing the music, which I found out one morning could drain your batteries faster than you know.

Candy colored screens greet you everytime UNIQLO's alarm app wakes you up

If you ask me, I have no idea why a clothing company such as UNIQLO would dip their toes on something like this social alarm app (yep you read it, social, but more or on that later), but I guess brand promotion is everything nowadays, right?

The app is available for both iOS and Android devices and features music created by Keigo Oyamada who was a Grammy nominee and Yoko Kanno, a famous anime composer who has worked on Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in a Shell  among others. Pretty impressive huh?

Now for the social part of the app, which is one feature I hardly use except to be slightly awed from time to time at having in my hands a visual on when people are waking up around the world. That is cool, but personally i've never really shared my own waking up time through the app because it's in the same thread as the over-sharing / frictionless sharing i'm beginning to resent on Facebook. But, your call.

For simply doing what an alarm app is supposed to do, Wake Up has become one app i'm loving at the moment.  So if you're a sleepyhead with an alarm problem, don't worry. UNIQLO wants to wake you up.

Five Apps that I Overuse

I've had my iPod Touch 4G for about 3 months now and all I can say is that i'm loving every minute of it. One is because of how I can take both my music and podcasts anywhere (there's a lot more to it like the amazing cover art and lyrics display, but heck those are basic stuff), and the other is because of how I can get the iPod functioning more like an iPhone just with the addition of applications! Awesome. Now here are my favorites so far:

1) Evernote (free)

I use this app so much, it's practically an extension of my brain, like an external memory bank if you will. I can save random thoughts, images, audio, articles from the web and more with the littlest effort and with the assurance that I can access it anytime I want using whatever device I have. What makes Evernote such a great tool for taking down notes and what have yous is how you can separate items into notebooks, which basically act as folders so you know where to find stuff after you've gone on a note taking frenzy. Add to that the ease with which you can access your notes later on whether on your desktop pc, on the web, or on your mobile phone, because everything is synchronized seamlessly. Personally, I use it for my little "projects", you know essays i'm in the process of writing and whenever I simply want to research on a certain subject and take down notes. Oh and by the way, this post actually got started on Evernote, there you go.

2) Fruit Ninja (paid, 0.99)

I'm not really into games, save for those that allow me to just zone out and click and swipe without thinking much and that's why Fruit Ninja is perfect for me. I just make a slicing motion on the screen as a variety of fruits pop out on the screen while of course trying to evade bombs the come out every now and then. I even got the paid version just to throw in the fun of competing against my siblings for the top score. My sister and I are still fighting over the ownership of the still unbeaten 447.

3) imo (free)

The iPod Touch may function like the iPhone but it still isn't the iPhone of course because of the glaring absence of the sms and call functions. No worries though because I easily made up for that with the addition of this one stop messaging app called imo. If you have skype, ym, and facebook accounts then you can access all of your messages right here. It doesn't support video though so for that I jump over to the separate app for skype, ym, or facetime, whichever floats your boat. You also need wi-fi to access it so if you really need to talk to someone asap, better use your mobile.


4) Read it Later (free)

This app made it to the list for one reason - I bookmark like crazy. I have a plug-in on my laptop's web browser as well so I can read on whichever device i'm using and get this, even when i'm offline. Homerun.

5) Pulse News (free)

(Source: cnet reviews)

I like keeping abreast on a wide variety of topics and news from all over the world which is not an easy feat because there isn't a single news organization or publication dedicated to the task. That's what makes Pulse News a godsend. I just pick the websites I want to follow and it creates a mosaic out of my choices from where I can view all of the latest articles. No need to weave a dizzying trail of one website after another or spending a good part of the day checking up on them one by one. Now I just open the Pulse News app, scan through the mosaic of the latest news arranged by website name and pick a treat to feed my mind. Love it.