Ever since moving to using a Mac as my primary computer I've wanted a simple app for building photo collages, cards, etc - something more than what iPhoto itself provides. After looking around the only one I could find that was reasonable was iCollage from the company Wondershare.

I happened to find it on sale via MacZot so tried the demo only to start running into problems.  I submitted some bug reports via their official support site and, after a long wait received a response saying that because it was the weekend their support staff would respond on the Monday.  Due to the deal running over a weekend I figured I'd risk it and bought the app.

The following Monday came and I started into a discussions with their support staff that went on for two weeks.  The delay in getting to the bottom of the issues left it too late to use iCollage for the project in mind I had so I left it alone.

This past weekend I decided to do a small collage for my mother's birthday and pulled up iCollage.  I manually resolved one of the bugs seen I'd seen before and started working on my project.  Well, let me tell you, I've never dealt with such a buggy, unstable piece of software before, it's surprising they released it for sale in its current state, there doesn't seem to be any way to work with it for more than a few minutes without it crashing!

So after submitting more bug reports and opening up another can of worms I figured I should start to publicly document some of the problems to warn off other potential customers.

Just to clarify: if Wondershare release a version of iCollage that is a) stable, b) resolves some of these issues, I will be more than happy to update these blog posts to note this fact; until then, I will continue to publicly document the bugs I find.

iCollage bugs:

• Images thumbnail pane size is incorrect, hides images.
• Does not recognize iPhoto library if files moved.
• Templates list is incorrect out of the box.
• Support system does not display the body of the original message, either that or they remove the text.
• Emails from their support system can include URLs back to the tickets that are invalid.

More soon..

Anyone who lives in Central Florida who's into anything IT-related, or design, or business management, or marketing.. or anyone who wasn't otherwise busy, should have been at BarCamp Orlando this past Saturday. With three rooms for presentations, there were plenty of sessions to cover just about any interest. Needless to say, it was awesome.

One of the best presentations, or rather two presentations, that I attended were from Murray Izenwasser who gave two great talks on business use of social media and, surprise surprise, how most companies don't have a clue of what they're doing. A key point was that just randomly throwing out a Facebook page or a Twitter account won't magically make the world shine on you. Contrary to popular opinion, if you're trying to build a social media following, if you build it they won't come, it takes a lot of planning and effort. I personally saw this at a company I worked with a few years back where the owner read an article about how blogs were great so decided to start a blog.. only then rather than letting it happen organically forced a rigid control over it so it became little better than their news announcements in a different form.

Another great session was, as always, Rob Dempsey talking about his favorite topics - agile management and scrum - always a good presenter.

A session I'm really sorry I missed was regarding IT in healthcare, particularly when it was one of the few that mentioned Drupal (my CMS of choice these days), but I'm looking forward to the notes being made available, I've heard it was very interesting and well presented.

So a huge thanks to Gregg Pollack, Eric Marden and everyone else who helped out! This year's was definitely full of win! I'm really looking forward to next year's...? :-)