Life Posters.  For Techlife readers who have been around these parts since the tadpole days, you may recall articles such as, “Life Poster: A Picasa How-To”  or “How to Make an Animated LifePoster: The Sequel.”

The Life Poster series of articles were fun and reader’s loved them.  A Life Poster is a photo collage of related images arranged in a grid format.  Often times the effect is immersive giving the viewer a sense of the event, location or people.

We also like photography games.  Go figure. Recently a reader, Bonnie,  posted a new high score for the “Where in the World?” game.  Click over and see if you can beat Bonnie’s score.  Another great game was by Grant Robinson, called “Guess the Google.”   Grant’s Guess the Google Engine also powers Montage-a-google.

How to make a Global Life Poster

1.  Visit Montage-a-google

2.  Select a keyword Examples include: yellow, yellow flower, mullets

3.  Click the “Make” button

4.  Examine your Global Life Poster, not perfect, tweak your search terms and run it again.

5.  When happy, click the “download image” button and save to your desktop

Montage-a-google goes out and gets 20 images from a Google Image search and assembles interesting square pattern montages or Life Posters with various cropped points to each image.  The results often need to be tweaked.  I found when creating my own and trying numerous search terms sometimes residual search term images would not leave the montage even when the terms were very different and while that produced odd results, it was not intended.  Let us know if you see the same issues.

Overall Call?

I like this app.   I would like to see it run a bit faster and have a few more options including clearing the image cache or field of images before performing the next montage.  The interface is easy and simple to use.  Go ahead make something profound and upload it to the Flickr with the tag montageagoogle and it will appear in the slide show.  Dazzle us.

We* are hobbyists just having fun developing for Android, but Google sure knows how to make our day.  Check out the email we got.

From: Android Market
Date: Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 3:46 PM
Subject: Device Seeding Program for Top Android Market Developers
To: rdrr.labs@gmail.com

Subject: Device Seeding Program for Top Android Market Developers

Due to your contribution to the success of Android Market, we would like to present you with a brand new Android device as part of our developer device seeding program. You are receiving this message because you’re one of the top developers in Android Market with one or more of your applications having a 3.5 star or higher rating and more than 5,000 unique downloads.

In order to receive this device, you must click through to this site, read the terms and conditions of the offer and fill out the registration form to give us your current mailing address so that we can ship your device.

You will receive either a Verizon Droid by Motorola or a Nexus One. Developers with mailing addresses in the US will receive either a Droid or Nexus one, based on random distribution. Developers from Canada, EU, and the EEA states (Norway, Lichtenstein), Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore will receive a Nexus One. Developers with mailing addresses in countries not listed above will not receive a phone since these phones are not certified to be used in other countries.

We hope that you will enjoy your new device and continue to build more insanely popular apps for Android!

(email links removed)

RDRR Labs has:

Timeriffic with near 4.5 stars and way more downloads.
24 a beta app has 3.8 stars and way more downloads.
Brighteriffic has near 4 stars and way more downloads.

*Update 1: “We” means, a friend who does the code and Techlife’s lead writer who does visual design for Android apps.