I am a total geek. And a Christmas nut. Put these two together and you'll realise that Day 4's Christmas Bucket List task was one I was going to enjoy:
Change ringtones to seasonal ones and
find some seasonal apps, wallpaper etc
The most difficult of these was changing the ringtone on my iphone. I'm really lucky that I thought to record Melchett singing Christmas songs when she was 3 and 4, so I have some absolutely classic versions with quirky timing and lyrics and giggling to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Jingle Bells, We Wish You A Merry Christmas and When Santa Got Stuck In The Chimney. Unfortunately for you Melchett has banned me from putting any of these online. She can see the funny side of them as ringtones, she just doesn't want the world laughing at her.....yet.
But as I say, she has allowed me to use We Wish You A Merry Christmas as a text tone and Jingle Bells as a ringtone.
But putting these onto an iphone isn't easy. For a start iTunes has removed the create your own ringtone function it used to have in iTunes 9 and younger. And I use Windows 7 which hides your file extensions as a default.
But using these two guides I managed to get around all this (after first importing my two files into iTunes - look in the 'File' drop down menu for 'Add file to library'):
Make a ringtone for your iphone in iTunes 10
How to change a file extension in Windows 7
I know I'm a saddo, but you can't imagined how tickled I was to get round the obstacles and create my own two special Melchettised ringtones :)
Next I changed my wallpapers on my iphone and desktop computer to Christmassy ones. I've got a picture of our front garden and my inflatable snowmen (snowmen in Arizona, and they don't melt!) on my iphone:
And a photo of the family all decorating our Christmas cookies for Father Christmas on Christmas Eve 2009....in my lovely old kitchen in Shropshire....which I miss.....sigh:
I also changed my Chrome theme to Christmas on Main Street:
And I also looked at some festive and seasonal apps. I like to have and regularly change my quirky and games apps on my phone for Melchett and I to play with (Goth Child has her own phone, mainly for reading fan fiction and manga). This is what we now have on there:
The 'CB Christmas' is A Charlie Brown Christmas app. I managed to get it 'on sale' at Thanksgiving for $4.99 but I notice it's now $6.99. It's really lovely, an interactive storybook of the classic Charlie Brown Christmas with hidden things to find around the 'book', ability to pause the story, to highlight single words to be read. Melchett loves it. I'm not convinced it's worth the higher price, but if you love Peanuts as much as we do you might think it worth it....
....which explains why we have the Snoopy's Street Fair app too. This is a freemium app, that has a free element but you can buy upgrades too....I haven't even had a chance to play this yet, Melchett loves it, so much that she's made Mr D load it on his ipad too. The only thing that I do know anything about, other that it being a game is that you can take Peanuts photos with it....so I have lots of these now in my phone photo album:
And these:
The Paper Flakes app is just like the Make-a-Flake website we've been playing with here for several years now.....actually I'm sure I first found it when I was still working as an accountant probably around 1992! It's fun and worth it's 99c but I wish the starting anew on a new flake was easier. Still Melchett and I have been having big fun with it and we like the scissor snipping noise :)
The seasonal version of Cut The Rope we first installed last Christmas. I love Cut the Rope. An easy game that still uses my brain a bit and I like it for Melchett that it's one she can learn skills and build on them ("if it does this, I wonder if it will do this"). Another one we're finding slightly more frustrating at the moment is Angry Birds Seasons. We love Angry Birds and have had Lite and Rio.....but Seasons I honestly don't think would be ok if we haven't learnt how to best fire our birds in the previous versions. This is a game where noth my daughters are waaaaay further on in the levels than me and scoring higher scores. I suspect I'm not going to catch them up but it is a fun app to play along with Melchett just so she can laugh at my ineptitude.
Jingle All The Way is a new interactive storybook app from Hallmark that I've only just installed so can't tell you what it's like yet. Melchett spotted it and asked if I could download it....and it has the ability to record your voice reading each page. She keeps sneaking my phone away and I can hear her reading it out loud so I suspect I'm going to be getting a 'surprise' for Christmas.
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