Filed under: Design, Fun, Internet, Kids, Photo, Text, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Commercial
Letterpop - make beautiful newsletters online
by Jason Clarke Jan 6th 2007 at 1:39PM
LetterPop! is a funky little web application that allows you to use drag and drop techniques to put together very sharp email newsletters. You pick from a set of templates, and you can drag and drop photos and write text, and basically publish a newsletter in short order. You'll need to sign up for the service, which is currently in beta mode, and therefore free for a year. Once you've signed up you are permitted to upload your own photos for use in your newsletters. The set of templates is somewhat limited right now, and heavily towards holiday themes. This makes sense, since this is the type of web service that will appeal to families for holiday family updates. There are also a number of generic templates, and luckily all of the templates are very well designed and attractive to look at. Personally I'd rather have a smaller selection with better templates to choose from rather than a huge selection of so-so templates.
Once you've created your newsletter, you have the choice of sending it as an email directly to your list of contacts, or publishing it to a dedicated address that you can then send to your contacts. The system keeps a profile page showing your history of newsletters, as well as allowing you to save your progress when working on a newsletter so you can come back and continue where you left off.
If I have a knock against LetterPop!, it's simply that it took forever for my signup to be processed. I suppose I should cut them some slack given that they're in a beta phase, but I was certainly surprised at how long it took. The page after you sign up for a beta account warns you that it could take up to 15 minutes, or you may have to contact support directly. They weren't kidding.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
grae said 8:17PM on 1-06-2007
can't even sign up...it's retarded. this is the message i get:
"We're sorry, but we're limiting signups during out Beta period. Please check back again in a couple of days or subscribe to our blog to find out when signups are open again."
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Patrick said 1:52AM on 1-08-2007
I had to do a double-take when I saw the newsletter template on their home page. It is almost a direct rip off of the "Family Newsletter" template in Apple's iWork Pages application.
Click on the link below to view an example of the Pages template that I found via Google. Outside of taking Apple's left column and transplanting it to the right and changing the color to blue, the templates are nearly identical.
An homage to the Pages template would be fine, but sheesh, this is just cut and paste theft.
http://macteens.com/images/uploads/pagespure1222005.jpg
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Rob said 11:45PM on 1-08-2007
Patrick, I noticed the same thing.
Here's a side by side comparison:
http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/189293/
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Jeremy Suriel said 8:12PM on 1-08-2007
Looks OK. You can also create something similar with yourminis ( http://www.yourminis.com ). There is a community of public pages that you can start from, or just start from scratch by selection a background, and drag n drop of minis.
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Manny said 1:26PM on 1-11-2007
This looks like a great app. Thank you. I am always looking for success tools , books, podcasts, etc for my site Success Books. I will keep this one in mind.
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