Playing with the Project Life app

I was skeptically optimistic when I heard Becky Higgins was doing an iPhone app. Though I’m a huge fan of Becky and the whole PL system, I think her digital products are overpriced for the digital market. Most of her core kits are $20, and I will never pay that much for a kit, unless it’s for charity.

I was pleasantly surprised at the pricing for the app. You get a few card sets free with the $2.99 app, and you can purchase additional ones for $0.99-1.99. The app comes with several template styles and photo collage templates. You can also purchase more if you’d like. I found the whole pricing structure much more reasonable than her other digital products (although I’m not sure if you’re getting the entire kit when you purchase through the app. I will confirm this when she adds more kits that I own)

I love that you can choose between squared and rounded corners. The cards fit well into the slots for either choice. I love the ease of it all. I did three pages in an afternoon. It was so fast! I love that I can easily scrapbook on the couch while Jason watches football. I like that I’m getting to use kits that I wouldn’t be able to buy at the regular digital price. I super love that when you type onto a journaling card, the text wraps around perfectly so you’re not typing over the embellishments on the card. I can’t even do that in PSE!

A few things that I’d like to see in future updates- An option for drop shadows, either within the app, or an option to export the templates on a transparent background so we can add our own. This might not be a big deal for paper scrappers using the app, but I’ve heard several digiscrappers complain about this. We don’t like flat looking pages. I’d also like to be able to write text on the photo spaces. There are workarounds to this by using other apps to add writing, then importing those into the PL app, but it would be nice to be able to skip this step. The photo editing in the PL app is extremely basic. You definitely want to do that in a different app as well.

How I plan to use the app. I probably won’t use this app for everyday scrapbooking. I love the clean look of my PL pages this year, but I will definitely consider using the app to catch up on previous years. I have a feeling that I’ll use the app a lot on multi photo collage type pages. Pages where I have a ton of photos, but I’m not really inspired to make pages with them so they’ve been sitting on my HD for years types of pages. Travel, scenery, holidays, etc.

Here are the pages I’ve made so far with the app-

This was the first one I made, using the Midnight kit. I just used pictures I had in my camera roll and made a quick little page about what MK has been up to lately. I think I used the photo editing within the app, but I might have used Pic Tap Go.

The other photos on my camera roll were from our recent day in Boca. I used the Kraft kit and one of the Squared Away templates (in-app purchase). The Kraft kit doesn’t have square cards, so they’re a bit wonky looking. But I like it, it looks different.

This is where I started getting really excited about the app. I’ve been wanting to scrap our 2009 trip to California lately. The photos needed a lot of help, so I edited them in RadLab on my computer. I created a “To scrap” folder in Aperture and shared it with my iPad. I was then able to use the edited photos in the PL app. I did all of that, including buying the Travel kit and putting the page together, all in less than 15 minutes. That’s when I figured out exactly how I wanted to use the app and how it would impact my scrapbooking. I was so excited!

I’m also really excited to try scrapbooking on the go. We’ll be going up to New Orleans this fall, so that will be the perfect opportunity to test it out! I can see myself scrapbooking in all sorts of exotic locations. The memory keeping possibilities for our summers alone are endless.

Has anyone else out there tried the app? I’d love to hear about your experiences and see your pages 🙂

These are numbers 6-8 of 25 pages I want to make in September.