Daily Archives: June 5, 2012

A New Wedding App for the Modern Bride

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The AppyCouple wedding app for iPhones, iPads and Androids.The Appy Couple wedding app for iPhones, iPads and Androids.

Gone are the days of sending multiple e-mails to your bridal party, calling family members with updates on wedding events, or sending mass texts to guests with directions to venues. Appy Couple, a new wedding app, can replace the traditional wedding planning methods, like building your own Web site, with an app for the tech-savvy, fast-moving and multitasking bride. You can stay in touch with your guests and organize events from your iPhones, iPads and Androids.

Unlike other wedding apps that focus on the planning aspects of a wedding, like iWedding Deluxe, Wedding Gawker and WeddingScan, Appy Couple focuses on creating an interactive experience where the bride and bridegroom can communicate with their bridal party and other guests. If you’re juggling multiple events, like an engagement party, bachelor and bachelorette parties and a rehearsal dinner, this app may be worth downloading.

Couples can begin their journey to hassle-free wedding coordination on AppyCouple.com, where they can create a custom wedding app that matches the tone and motif of their wedding. There they can include the story of how they met, engagement photos and special songs. A free coordinating Web site included with each custom app displays the same content as the app, and can be used by guests who don’t have a smartphone, like Granny, for example.

Once the app has been created, the couple can enter their guest list manually or upload it from a spreadsheet, and invite family and friends to access the app for free, using a special code. Each guest will then have access to information, including wedding events, dates, locations, travel accommodations and last-minute changes. There is also a privacy function that allows the bride and bridegroom to select certain guests, like members of the bridal party, to receive private messages.

All content, including messages and photos, uploads in real time so guests and members of the bridal party can stay up-to-date (if they choose). Guests can also upload their photos and post messages and toasts on the couple’s message board. The drawback is that guests can pretty much upload anything they want. So your cousin’s bachelor party photos may some how end up on the app. Couples are able delete images using the coordinating Web site, but there is no moderation button that gives couples the power to select which photos make the cut onto the app. (Appy Couple is currently working on creating a moderation feature.)

If guests can’t make it on your big day, your wedding Web site will live-stream photos to your customized application.

Sharmeen Mitha-Sehgal, the co-founder and chief executive of Appy Couple, came up with the idea after what she describes as her sister’s disastrous attempt at organizing a 500-person wedding in Mumbai.

“A typical Indian wedding is: several events, over multiple days, equals a logistical nightmare for guests, ” Ms. Mitha-Sehgal said.

Appy Couple is still in private beta and has already been used by thousands of couples, both nationally and internationally. For now, it’s free, but invitation-only. Appy Couple expects to begin its pay model this fall. There will be a onetime charge for the app and free unlimited app downloads for wedding guests.

If you’re willing to add another cost to your list of wedding payments, note that App designs start at $49, with limited-edition designs going for as much as $200. There are currently 100 designs and 50 more will be added by this fall.

Appy Couple Wedding App – WKRG

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Wedding planning can be fun, yet tedious at the same time.

A new app called “Appy Couple” helps you get the details you need out to your guest and in return helps your guest keep up by using their smartphones.

Here is how it works:

First, head to appycouple.com.  You will need an invite to join the site. Don’t worry if you don’t have one, the website lets you request an invite by entering your email address.

Once on the site, you will first choose your color and have your pick of designs for the app.

Next add your information: like the couple’s name, upload photos, how the couple met, who is in the wedding party and where they are registered.

Now it does cost money to publish the app. The price varies depending on the type of design you choose, but guests will be able to download your app for free from the iTunes store or Android Google Play Store.

Plan your perfect wedding with lover.ly

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Lover.ly

Lover.ly


Posted: Tuesday, June 5, 2012 12:09 pm
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Updated: 12:16 pm, Tue Jun 5, 2012.


Plan your perfect wedding with lover.ly

Eddie Gribbin

Calkins Media, Inc.

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Social media sites – such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest – all can help you plan your dream wedding with tips, techniques, and inspirations. Well, what if you needed more help? Lover.ly is an inspirational search engine and scrapbook for all wedding categories.

You can browse over 100,000 images handpicked by their blogging editors and community.

Today, the website announced it has started a partnership with top lifestyle and luxury brands for users to shop around for products.

Via press release: When users search for a certain topic, such as “wedding jewelry,” in addition to viewing beautiful image results procured from real weddings from Lover.ly’s numerous editorial partners, they will now also receive images of individual styles that can be purchased from The Wedding Suite at Nordstrom or Kwiat through a direct link from Lover.ly. Equally, search results for “unique save-the-dates” will populate eye-catching designs from Minted’s array of wedding stationary and direct link access to the site for more information or to purchase.

In addition to its new partners, Lover.ly has also added a number of new tools and usability functions to the site, including vertical scrolling and an advanced search bar on the homepage where users can search for images by color. Finding that many brides start their searches by color, Lover.ly’s intuitive tool is very useful for finding specific inspirational images. Images categorized on Lover.ly within a given color family are displayed for the user, which they can then save to their “Bundle,” Lover.ly’s online version of an inspiration board. Bundles can easily be shared with friends and family as part of the wedding planning process.

If you would like more information about the website, check out the FAQs section.

© 2012 www.phillyburbs.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Tuesday, June 5, 2012 12:09 pm.

Updated: 12:16 pm.

Minecraft-Themed Wedding Includes 8-Bit Decorations

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People have theme weddings all the time, and it seems like nerds are always the first to make them extreme and extremely awesome. From Star Wars to Transformers to everything in between, nerd weddings are always a feast for the eyes and usually make you say, “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that!” They incorporate all the things the couple loves while not taking the day too seriously.

One couple had so much trouble deciding on one theme that they just picked them all, turning their big day into a festival of Harry Potter, “Back To The Future”, Christmas, rockabilly, and “Star Wars”.

nerd wedding

Matt Dunn and Asia Ramirez managed to narrow their theme down, however; since they bonded over a game of Minecraft, they decided to incorporate it into their wedding day. Not only were there huge cardboard statues painted to look like bits of the Minecraft game, everything from the cake to the groom’s tie fit into the theme.

“What made the game so special to us,” Matt said, “was the ability to join the same game and explore our own virtual Minecraft world together. Someday we would love to travel the world and have real-life adventures of our own. But for the time being, Minecraft was/is our portal to feeding our creative and adventurous sides without spending tons of money we don’t have.”

Matt and Asia got help from friends and family to build the decorations for the reception, which included an 8-bit graphic pig, ducks, and a life-sized character. They say it was a way for them to involve family members who weren’t familiar with the game and make them feel like they were a part of the big day.

“In the end,” Matt said, “Even people who had never heard of Minecraft were able to enjoy the experience without feeling alienated, and I think everything turned out to be pretty damn classy. Maybe I’m a bit biased?”

minecraft wedding
Image credit: The Goodness

Couple uses Ellicott City as backdrop for a ‘walking wedding’

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You’ve heard of a destination wedding, of course. But what about a wedding where getting there is, by design, half the fun?

Heather Beck and her fiancé Shawn Kettering weren’t familiar with the notion either. Yet they went ahead and designed their nuptials as a “walking wedding” — a tour of Ellicott City’s Main Street.

Having moved to Ellicott City (well, just over the Patapsco on the Baltimore County side, but considered Ellicott City nonetheless) just over a year ago, the history buffs felt right at home.

“The community feels like a big family and I wanted to get all the merchants involved,” said the bride. “Originally I wanted our guests to be able to visit all the shops, but we had to narrow it down.”

The wedding was held Monday, June 4. A Monday wedding is another unusual choice, but the newlyweds, like many of their friends, are thespians — both are long-timers at Toby’s Dinner Theatre in Columbia. And Monday is the one night of the week stages are traditionally dark, allowing the couples’ colleagues to share in the festivities.

“Our wedding plan morphed into this,” said Kettering, who wrote the “script” for the ceremony and directed the rehearsal — he is a director, after all. “First we wanted a beach wedding, then at a country club, then a kind of a scavenger hunt on Main Street where guests would stop at one place for a champagne toast, and so on.”

So on Monday morning the gals of the wedding party had their hair done at Oh la Lal Hair Salon off Old Columbia Pike, while the guys set up things at Ellicott City Brewing Company and installed mammoth “Shawn Heather’s grand wedding” signage at Mt. Ida. They all cleaned up and dressed up for photos at Obladi Hotel’s patio garden back down on Main Street, then joined guests for champagne and shopping at the Antique Depot across from the railroad station.

Next, folks window-shopped their way to the back of Tonge Row, where they could check out the new Scoop Ahh Dee Doo ice cream parlor and the Ghost Lounge Hookah Bar before hopping on a shuttle up to Mt. Ida. In hilly Ellicott City, after all, you can only go so far in long dresses and dress shoes.

On Mt. Ida’s level lot, the Chalice Messengers, a jazz band from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia, perked everyone up, performing everything from “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing” to the theme from “The Flintstones.” Guests picked up their party bags and umbrellas which they could use for cover if it rained, as walking sticks if it did not, or just to strut around with, New Orleans-style, marching with the band on the way down to the ceremony in the Howard County Historical Society.

But first, as the group assembled for photos, during which they traded comment such as “You were in ‘Nunsense’!” and “I would never downstage a woman. Always be behind the woman!” Which was no wonder, as three-quarters of them were from Toby’s — as attested to by doyenne Toby Orenstein herself, who was at the festivities.

At the Historical Society, the ceremony was Standing Room Only, and why not? With two personable and informal actors “on stage,” as well as professionals including the bride’s sister Sara Beck and her husband Park Chisolm of the band Modern West providing music, and little cousin ring bearers Will and Jack Kettering “losing” the rings, the only proper response was a standing ovation.

The ceremony was “so them, so happy-go-lucky,” judged guest Caroline Bowman, a Toby’s “graduate” back from Broadway where she is appearing in “Wicked.”

“It was a performance, but the love is not.”

Back on Main Street for the reception at the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company, guests admired and anticipated the glorious wedding cake baked overnight by sleep-deprived but still cheerful actor-friend Robert Beidermann (except for its Star Wars cake topper, pretty much the opposite in spirit of the whoopee pies the groom had made for rehearsal dinner dessert). And it soon became evident that not only were the Beck and Kettering families uniting in joy but so were the couple’s other families from work and home.

As fellow performer Shannon Wollman summed up, “It’s a magical night celebrating theater and friendship.”

How I Went From A Single Gal To A ‘Wif’ (75 Percent Of A Wife) To A Wife

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I recently celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary. I cannot believe that the time has flown by so quickly and been so joyful. As I walked down the aisle 10 years ago, I never would have predicted that 10 years later, my husband and I would be business partners — producing Off-Broadway theater no less! — spending 24 hours, seven days a week together and loving it.

As I reflect back on my 10 years of marriage with my wonderful husband David, I chuckle at the fact that during those first few years, I refused to be called a “wife”. I mean “girlfriend” and “fiancée” were fine. But “wife”… whoa, that was a loaded term and I was not accepting it.

I moved out of my parents’ home at 18 and got married at age 30. So in between I had plenty of “me” time, plenty of time to explore and be an independent single gal. I lived in three different cities, including a jaunt across the country to the west coast.

I loved having my independence. After growing up with slightly strict, okay very strict (I didn’t even have my first date until I was the ripe old age of 21) parents, I was ready to make my own rules. I was ready to be on my own and in control. But what did this mean? I had no clue.

I knew that I could decide what I wanted to wear. I could decide what to cook (or not cook for dinner — hence the gaining of 10 post-college pounds, since the only action my stove saw was the underside of the pizza box as it rested on top). I could decide what movie to see, what car to buy, what apartment to rent. But it also meant I had to decide what car to buy, what apartment to rent and what movie to see (sometimes by myself). The transition from being told what to do to deciding what to do for myself was hard but rewarding. I needed to learn what I liked, and that my opinion mattered.

In my first few relationships I was struggling as much with wanting to be in control as with wanting to have my fantasy boyfriend. In the process, I went a little overboard sometimes. I either gave too much of myself (I bought one of my early boyfriends about five Valentine’s gifts while I later found out he only considered us dating and barely wished me Happy Valentine’s Day) or too little (on the other hand, I nearly took off the head of a guy on our first date because he bought my subway token and put it in the slot for me. I thought, “does this guy think that I can’t buy my own token?!”).

As I matured, I came to realize that our struggle for control is not with another person, but within ourselves. I learned to push myself so that I could garner more confidence. I remember the first time I went to a movie by myself; I probably had on dark shades, a sunhat and a scarf, just in case anyone saw me. Now that I am married with a 4-year-old, I would text the world I am going to the movies by myself, “Wooo hoooo!” if I could.

Luckily, David escaped some of my earlier attempts at finding myself and finding balance, but not completely. The first few years of our marriage I REFUSED to be a called a wife. I mean I loved my husband and I loved being married, but I did not want to be called a wife. Why? I had rigid ideas in my head about what the term “wife” meant. A wife for me meant a woman who cooked and cleaned for her man — and as my matron of honor said at my wedding, “I don’t know why anyone bought any dishes, because Jamillah is not cooking”. A wife was a secondary complement to the man. A wife had no other identity. I mean what happened to my name… now I am just wife. I don’t think so. Now let me say that none of this had anything to do with my husband. He never once imposed a role on me… he knew before we got married that I couldn’t cook. My ideas all had to do with my past. I was taking the role I saw my mother play and rebelling against it and allowing my past make me fearful of my future.

It took some time, but once I realized this, I realized that I had the control within me and no one could change who I was or my worth by calling me a wife. I came to understand what my aunt meant when she told me a few weeks after my wedding “Be a good wife.” She meant be that person who makes him happy and who he can rely on. And doing that doesn’t mean giving up any part of me.

Even though I am shy by nature, I am grateful that being in theater has forced David and I to share our love publicly and emboldened so many audience members to ask us how we managed to spend all of our time together without killing each other!

Unwittingly becoming relationship advisors to so many people has encouraged us to constantly look at the lessons of our love and given us the courage to finally share what we’ve learned. I don’t say I am the champion of love, but I will say without hesitation that I am a cheerleader for love!

So with three cheers, here are three tips that have helped me have love and happiness:

1. Let my past be my past. Always be present in this relationship (don’t let old hurts from the past negatively influence your present relationship).
2. Let him care about you.
3. Keep it simple (and silly). Keep comedy in their life. Happy husband, good loving.

For more information about Perfect Combination: 7 Key Ingredients to Happily Living and Loving Together, check out Jamillah and David’s website www.acoupleoflambs.com.

Yami Gautam’s bridal photoshoot

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The Vicky Donor actress Yami Gautam was seen posing for a bridal photoshoot being conducted by the Wedding Affair magazine!

Yami Gautam jokingly said: “I think it is fun, and what better start than this hot, humid day!”

Well though it was a bridal photoshoot, Yami was not seen as a typical Indian bride!

She said: “In Vicky Donor, I played a Bengali bride, and this is a very different kind of a theme! Shooting for Wedding Affair is really prestigious! I’ve loved the covers, I have loved the magazine…It is fun since it is not a typical wedding outfit, it is something very dreamy, very westernized.”

Catch the pics from Yami Gautam’s photoshoot, here at ApunKaChoice:

Yami Gautam Photo Gallery / Stills / Images / pictures