I promise not to turn this blog into a big long marketing campaign for Mixel, but our users continually surprise me with their ingenuity so I can’t help posting at least some of what I come across. Not only are they making great stuff with the app’s purposefully primitive tools, they’re also starting to take some of this stuff offline in ingenious ways.

All Over the World

Last night, I was pleasantly surprised to find out over Twitter that a group of avid Mixel fans have come together to form a Mixel users group in Indonesia. I don’t know who they are, but now I have an excuse to go to Indonesia, which is awesome.

Closer to home, several of Mixel’s most active users have organized an informal meetup here in Brooklyn, which is taking place this coming Thursday at Quarterbar. This happened entirely without our provocation or intervention, so we’re even more excited that people are passionate enough about the app to want to get together on their own. My co-founder Scott and I both plan on being there, and everyone’s welcome. The invitation was even created with Mixel, naturally:

Maybe the most surprising offline Mixel activity of all was cooked up by a friend of mine, Keenan Cummings. He calls it Muxel and in it he’s translated the digital experience of Mixel back into an analogue collage experience. The neat thing is he’s using the postal service as a way to maintain something of Mixel’s uniquely social dynamic.

The idea is that you use scissors and traditional collage parts — magazines, photos, colored paper, etc. — to assemble your collage in the standard way — almost. Instead of gluing things down, Muxel asks you to instead photograph the final composition. You post your completed collage, then you mail the pieces off to the next user, who does the same, and so on and so on. The project just kicked off, but the results already look terrific.

Update

One last note on Mixel: we’ve just released version 1.1, an update to the app that fixes some memory crashes and some rendering bugs. This latest version also now lets you save snapshots of your in-progress mixels to the Photos app on your iPad. You can download it from the App Store today.