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
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.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
