The Mixing Bowl 15

If pigs could fly … they’d travel the world!

The moment I saw this book, I knew I had to cover it here on the Mixing Bowl. It was witty, creative, cute and downright fun.

Mixbooker Candy Y. proves that pigs can fly, and that they can also travel in style. In the book, “Voyage with McMug and McDull,” 2 pigs take off on an adventure to exotic locales with delicious food all along the way. These pigs have been more places than I could ever have imagined!

Some highlights:

- delectable dumplings in Taipei, Taiwan
- a feast in Bangkok, Thailand
- snorkeling in Bohol, Philippines
- building snowmen in Hokkaido, Japan
- visiting the Olympic stadium and Water cube in Beijing, China
- stunning views of the Grand Canyon in America
- traveling along Australia’s Gold Coast

Boy, pigs sure can take great photos! Take a cue from this awesome Mixbook and have fun with your photos. And be sure to share your experiences with us by emailing us at feedback@mixbook.com

If pigs can fly, then they can definitely Mixbook,
Alison

A New Feature is Coming…

Hi Mixbookers!

Andrew Laffoon here, live from the Mixbook HQ.  It’s 3am, and it’s time for our weekly feature release!  In order to whet your appetite for this weeks new features, I’ve included some sweet Flickr photos of our new features below.  This is going to be a powerful new release, and you will have the ability to do some amazing things with your photos that you cannot do anywhere else on the web!

With two page view, you can drag photos to the full size of the spread and make beautiful layouts like this one.

It’s easy to do…

And…imagine how beautiful it’s going to look in print.  Oh, yes.

Keep making your great books, and we’ll keep making awesome improvements to Mixbook!  Let us know what you think about the new feature once you use it - feedback at mixbook dot com.

Andrew Laffoon
Chief Mixbooker

The Mixing Bowl 14

The summer is here! And we’re so excited to see all those Mixbooks of your summer trips. To inspire you, we’d like to highlight Janet C.’s book about her trip to Thailand. It’s filled with elephants, snake charmers, and a Thai McDonald’s! It’s exotic, tropical, and fun.

We hope that even if you don’t go somewhere this season, that you’ll try out our new features to make a book of your daily adventures. Go crazy and be creative!

Happy Mixbooking,
Alison

From Screen to Shining Screen

We’ve got two new features over here at Mixbook, and I can’t stop singing their praises! Keep reading to find out how much cooler your photobook will be because of them!

The first is fullscreen mode - now you can expand the photobook creator to take up your whole monitor screen by clicking on the fullscreen button at the top right-hand corner of the tool bar next to “Automix.” If you click the button once more, it will return to normal viewing. This feature will come in handy when you are putting pages together or resizing photos, because you’ll have more work area.

The second awesome feature is the ability to add a reflection to any photo or text that you want by clicking “Style” in the black editing tool bar. You can change the blur, offset (how much of the reflection is showing), and the opacity of the reflection. Ooooh, shiny!

Pages with beautiful landscapes and scenes will benefit from this feature - see the page we created below as an example of what you can do with the reflection tool.

We look forward to seeing what you do with these new tools, and we’d love to hear your experience with them! Have a wonderful weekend Mixbooking!

Alison

Customer Love

I just received this email from a happy Mixbook customer:

“I just received my mixbook and it looks awesome!!!!! I LOVE IT !!!! I am already making an other one lol Thank you”

We love hearing your stories and feedback!  That’s what drives us to make the most powerful and easy to use photobook editor on the web! 

Andrew Laffoon
CEO and Chief Mixbooker

Somebody’s Gotta Take Out the Trash!

And we expect you (yes, you) to do it! We’ve just released two fun new features for our new Creator, and one of them is a helpful little trash can at the bottom right corner of the screen. Drag text items, photo elements into the can, and POOF! They’re gone! We’re making clean up EASY!

Our second feature is, simply put - SUPER FUN! We have added 10 new fonts - some swirly, some girly, some adventurous, and some are just plain cool. Now you can add more variety to your books! Check out the fun by creating your own book!

And don’t forget to pick up after yourself.

-Alison

The Blog’s on Us

A great blog post was written about Mixbook on Langwitches.org - thank you to Silvia for posting yet another informative and thorough article about how Mixbook’s online software can be used in the classroom. A class of fourth graders used Mixbook to create a book about famous explorers - they divided into groups and each group took a double page spread and researched and wrote about their assigned explorer.

This kind of hands-on project allows children to create something easily and beautifully while helping them to understand technology.

The children did a wonderful job on the project and you can view it here.

A new update is born!

Our newest improvement to date is here! Finally, a new photobook creator is born! This creator is faster, easier to use, and completely customizable. You spoke, and we heard you. You wanted to create your own layouts from scratch, and now you can. Here are a few other changes and updates that have been made:

- Faster and smoother uploading process
- Undo and Redo buttons (great for the klutzes like me who need to fix simple mistakes)
- Photos can be dragged straight from the photo drawer to a blank page
- Preview your book right in the photobook creator!
- Resize, rotate, and crop photo slots
- Add a color overlay to backgrounds
- Adjust the drop shadow on your photo
- Usage of the Cut and copy shortcut keys

This is just the beginning of the list of cool new features we’ll be adding in the next few months, if you have any feedback please feel free to email us at info@mixbook.com with any questions or comments.

Until then, enjoy the new photobook creator!

Now Updating Mixbook

Hi Everyone!

Get ready for the most amazing version of Mixbook you’ve ever seen. Later tonight, we will be unwrapping a totally new release of the Mixbook Photobook Editor - the Mixbook Creator. We expect it to be up by around 4am PST. We’ll let you all know when it’s ready! (and then we’ll get some sleep…)

Andrew and the rest of the Mixbook Team

Quotable Quotes

We just love being loved. Here are some quotes from our users about Mixbook. We are so grateful for your kind words!

“I love Mixbook and regret that I can’t just spend all day and night mixing it up!” - Sayuri S.

“Mixbook easily creates sharp looking books.”- Martha T.

“I’m really happy with the quality of your Mixbooks. I recently created one, got it printed and all I can say is that it is the best little photo album that I’ve ever had.” - Darius Z.

And we get praise from teachers too! Many teachers use Mixbook as a tool to teach their students and to help them process what they’ve learned in the classroom. Here is what they had to say:

“Great potential for collaborative classroom creation, editing and publishing of books. Great variety of layouts, including text AND images.” - Silvia T.

“Students simply load the pictures into the page, insert text where they want it and boom! A book is born.” - Patrick H.

“Any time we give students the opportunity to create products that demonstrate their learning, they are much more motivated to do the hard work of learning. Mixbook helps us with this!” - Jennifer B.

Thanks to all who took the time to email us! We appreciate you.

Alison