I am fortunate to have two fabulous friends who still find it chic and in classic good taste to find a curious local postcard in their travels and write a simple note, in pens of all colors, with an odd sticker or drawing, and send the card on its merry way to me. I usually stick them on my refrigerator, seeing it every day on my way in and out of the kitchen, and only take them down once the sun has faded their penmanship to the slightest of yellowed grey, retiring them into the recycling bin. True, postcards have become passe in recent years – at least the cheesy ones with cliche catch phrases – but kitschy is always endearing, and odd postcards from Kentucky picturing old grandmothers in rocking chairs on their delapidated porches, an iconic pitcher of southern Strawberry Lemonade at their side have their place as memento keepsakes.

In those times when you decide not to buy a cheap postcard, or simply don’t find one to your liking, Postman is an iPhone app by Taptivate that allows you to create your own postcards, with neat, themed templates, font styles, color changes, a stock photo library of famous landmarks, and the ability to use your own photo album or iPhone camera to more deeply personalize the card. Appealing to those techno geeks out there, Postman’s digital postcards manage to transcend past those awful e-cards I tend to regard as spam or junk mail, even if sent from a dear friend – I have particular animosity toward those cartoony, animated ones that repeat the same, two-second animation in a neverending loop of “You Made My Day Real Special!” (insert *gag* reflex here). No, Postman is much more personalized than that, but be warned that if your friend thinks the digital postcard too cheesy, then you have no one to blame but yourself.

The best ability of Postman is using a freshly taken picture in a themed setting. The app adjusts the picture’s size and coloration to suit the background; you’ll notice with the “Antique” theme” – a pretty, sepia toned palette with elegant brown borders – whatever picture you choose to insert will automatically adopt a worn, sepia look. So far, this theme is my favorite, as sepia has this majestic ability to make every picture, even the lame picture of my couch, more dramatic, mysterious, and breathtaking. Other themes include a beach with cute seashells and conches and the beach afar; a rose-laden background that manages not to be cheesy with the elegantly askew picture frame in the center; a classic white border; a vignette with shadowed corners that, unfortunately, while looking good in thumbnail, usually only succeeds in darkening your image, making it look underexposed; a border of leaves in the autumnal hues of gold, red, orange and green; a funny retro postcard background, with your picture contained within the letters of “Here” in the phrase “GREETINGS FROM HERE”; and three slightly odd themes I probably would never use, including a television with your picture in the screen (I’ll admit the way the app has your picture turn fuzzy, like the image off an old television, is pretty cool); a front page news article with your picture blown up in black and white, the highlight, obviously, of your travels; and a Las Vegas billboard theme with your picture on the billboard, green pastures below. Or, of course, you can opt not to use a theme and just have the picture front and center, with no borders, with or without a personal message in your font and color of choice.

After you figure out the natural hubris entailed in personalizing the postcard front, it’s on to personalize the back! The back is simpler, with a clean and neat, classic postcard backing, with a faux postage stamp in the upper right showing a United States seal. Tap “edit text” to type a dear message, or something ridiculously entertaining, or even something crass, depending on whom the card recipient is, and tap “text style” to choose among different font styles and colors and sizes. I, oddly enough, prefer the Helvetica typefront, despite never using it anywhere else, and I prefer classic black over the other colors, which can appear too grating on the optic nerve (hello, yellow). There is a cute option to adjust the weather, so you may indicate to your postcard recipient whether the weather was Sunny, Cloudy, Rainy, Snowy or Storm! with a black icon shown in the upper left, above your message. Once your postcard is finished, picture and writing complete, post it on facebook or twitter, or other social networking sites for all your friends to admire. Or, should you desire a more private note, send it through email, all by tapping the “Share” tab on the navigation bar. I’m glad Postman opted to keep the message to postcard size, rather than allowing you to extend the writing indefinitely in a giant essay that obviously wouldn’t fit on a standard postcard. It’s good to keep it simple, and real.

With its cute and unique and non-gag-inducing templates, Postman is an original spin on the classic Postcard, and is sure to elicit a note of curiosity and appreciation from your friends. Postman offers something fresh for postcard afficionados, and while it may not replace the real thing, sometimes the new is better than the old.