Apple Scholarship winners get together to make a Greeting Card app: Greetale

Earlier this year at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference Apple gave scholarships to young smart up and coming app developers from around the world. You’d expect many of them to go on a release loads of apps, but what’s also happened is a bunch of them have gotten together to build one together.

Four 2016 WWDC Scholars from America and Australia have put together something that seeks to bring back a generations old gesture – the handwritten greeting card.

Not long ago I told you about Cardly which allows you to pick a card, choose a handwriting style and print a greeting card and have it delivered by post. Greetale takes that idea a step further by actually using your handwriting.

Rustin Rassoli, 17 year old from Houston Texas noticed the gesture and impact a handwritten card had no his mother’s birther when her cousin sent a handwritten card.  Questioning why we don’t do this anymore the idea for Greetale was born.

Bringing together James Dale (16) from Melbourne, 14 year old Harish Yerra from Nebraska and Rui Zhou (17) from New York the work began.

The app is remarkably simple and easy to use, and draws on a lot of WWDC learnings, including Apple Pay purchases.

I downloaded the app, grabbed a sheet of white paper and wrote a note to my Son for his birthday.

Greetale then uses your phone camera to take a “scan” of that paper and produce a black and white reproduction of the writing to print onto the card.

It is 100% Black and white, no grey, so the outcome is clearly not hand-written, but the uniqueness of your own handwriting is most certainly captured.

Once I chose a card and made the payment my work was done, and the card arrived a few days later.  Simple, great idea.  The card I sent cost $3.99 (USD) which includes the card, printing and the postage.  Not bad at all.

Right now the team have no other active group projects but they’re keen to work together again.

As individuals Rustin has invested into two other apps, ‘face fix’ and ‘spider webz’,  This is Harish’s first app (other than his WWDC scholarship app),  Rui has created a game and his WWDC scholarship app, James has created apps mainly for private companies/governments and his WWDC scholarship app.

Give it a go, send a personal card to someone in your life!

App Store: Greetale