Category: Software

What are the golden plates of our time? A thousand years ago, if you wanted to make sure information was going to be around for your children’s children’s children, you took out your chisel and started hacking away on metal plates–preferably golden.

What are my options today? I have several thousand digital pictures, a digital journal, a weblog and pretty much every hour of work I’ve done for the last 5 years are all in digital format. From what I’ve read, I can expect a hard drive to last maybe 10 years, CD?s not much longer… what else is there? Are all my captured memories, all my work and all my writings going to be around for my grandkids? Should I stop using a computer and start learning how to etch metal?

Maybe I sound nostalgic, but really… how do you make sure something digital lasts longer than the medium it’s on?

Tonight I?ve spent the last couple hours converting a Photoshop image to HTML in Dreamweaver. I read a lot of places where Dreamweaver takes a lot of slack from those who only code in notepad, or who are anti-WYSIWYG editors; personally, I don’t understand this. I started using Dreamweaver back at version 3, before I knew much of anything about HTML. Since then, I’ve never bought a single book on HTML or really sat down to dedicate myself to a couple hours of studying HTML, but I feel I know it as good as most and better than many.

Rather than keeping me away from the code, Dreamweaver has helped me learn it. I’ve almost always used it in the split view where you see both design and code (part out of curiosity, part out of necessity). Being able to see exactly what code is written for every thing I do has helped enormously. I’m a visual thinker, seeing a block of HTML highlighted when I select a table cell helps ingrain in my mind exactly what the code is supposed to look like.

I’ve gotten to the point now where I could feasibly write all the HTML that Dreamweaver writes for me without Dreamweaver, but why would I when I don’t have to? I suppose there’s the argument that it’s more fun that way; and to a point, I’ll agree–sometimes it is more fun. I find however, that when pressed with a deadline, fun is secondary and Dreamweaver helps me get it done faster. I have not had problems with Dreamweaver re-writing my code or re-formatting it (there are settings to control how much, if any, of that it does) and I’ve found that the HTML Dreamweaver writes is generally pretty clean.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 also does a pretty good job with supporting most aspects of CSS. For static sites (do people still make those ;)) the templating system in Dreamweaver is great. Site management is good for that as well (uploading to and from the server, version control etc.) For dynamic sites, I use Dreamweaver to get the basic HTML set and then apply the code.

On the PC, the interface is nothing short of brilliant. Macromedia has steadily improved the UI with each release and with MX 2004, space is utilized almost perfectly. On the Mac, it’s a different story. It doesn’t look bad on a Mac by any means, but you still have the floating panels and you don’t get the tabs to quickly see what you have open & switch between documents.

Needless to say, I’m a fan. I think Macromedia has left very little room for improvement with Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Today we decided to use the new “Projects” feature in Flash MX 2004 Professional to manage a fairly large interactive piece we’re doing at work. We started setting up the project in Flash after reading about the benefits of using Flash Projects to control versioning and make sure the files are in a central location. It didn’t take us long to discover that Flash Projects have a ways to go before they are usable for the type of project we’re doing.

Basically, the only thing we wanted to do was create a project that would keep track of several Flash files on the server and allow us to check them out, work on them locally, upload them automatically to the server when we checked them back in and then publish them based on our settings at one time. Simple enough, right? That’s what we thought.

This is where Projects fall flat. If I create a file and add it to my project, anyone else who wants to use the same file has to manually add it to their project, there’s no way for new files to be automatically added to all the participants project. This wouldn’t be a problem with a 5 or 10 file project, but once it gets bigger than that, adding every file manually gets pretty tedious.

In addition, there’s no easy way to have the same folder structure in the Flash Project as on the hard drive and/or the server–you have to manually create folders in Flash to manage that.

Those are the obstacles we could get around. The one that we really didn’t like was the fact that the only way to add a file that you didn’t create to your project was to use the Finder (mac) or Windows Explorer (PC) to browse to the server, download the file to your local hard drive, add it to the Flash Project in Flash then start using it. If you didn’t do that, you could get the file from the server, but once you went to check it back in, Flash complained that it couldn’t check it in because the file didn’t exist on the local drive.

We didn’t even get far enough to get into the publish profile settings… by that time, we’d had enough.

The solution? We set the entire project up as a Dreamweaver site. Everything works perfectly there, in addition, we can use Dreamweaver to edit text files, external ActionScript and XML files without opening up another application. If you’re thinking about using Flash Projects to manage a large project, I’d suggest you wait until it matures a little. Right now, Dreamweaver seems to be the tool that will work for us.

Lately at work we’ve had some “issues” trying to figure the best way to get content from the hands of content developers (the people who write the tech manuals) to instructional specialists (the people who develop training or other courses) to the Flash programmers and Graphic Designers who are developing multimedia training pieces as the final product.

Currently, there are no existing tools (that I’m aware of) that allow you to “storyboard” content to hand over to a Flash (or Director or Authorware) programmer and have them be able to recognize what interactions need to take place and what content needs to go where.

Depending the size of the course we’re developing, this can go from being a minor inconvenience to a show-stopper. There needs to be a way for the content to be organized and easily retrievable, but at the same time easy to input and provide some way of previewing what the final output might look like so the instructional specialists can get a better idea of what they’re working on.

We’ve developed a tool in Microsoft Access which does basically what we need, but leaves much to be desired due to the inherent flaws in Access (trust me, there are lots of them). I’m interested in learning more about what other people are doing to solve this problem, or if there is a tool out there that had been fine tuned to this process.

A few useful links to sites that will help you decide on a Content Management System. I used these today at work.
· OSCOM – Open Source (free) content management information.
· CMS Review – “The mission of CMS REVIEW is to give you the resources you need to choose the best content management system for your organization.”
· CMS Matrix – Allows you to view the features of, and compare, several top Knowledge Management systems.
· Cylogy – Cylogy is a company that specializes in CMS consulting. These are the people to pay if you’re willing to pay big bucks for both a recommendation for a CMS and the CMS itself.
· CMSWire – CMS Wire provides commentary, news and product information on several content management systems.
· CMS Watch – CMS Watch is a site that provides analysis and reports about web content management solutions.

Most of these sites link to other, similar sites, so if you’re in the process of researching content management, better create a new folder in your bookmarks.

Content management systems are something that I am very interested in. By nature (or by lack of study, I can’t figure out which) I am not a programmer, but I am however, a web developer and I have a very real need to present my clients (and myself) with an easy way to manage and store content online. Using static HTML for everything is not an option.

I’ve written previously about the CMS WebGUI, which I currently use for several websites and I’m very impressed with so far. WebGUI is due for the new, version 6.0, release sometime this or next week which will add several features, including making it 100% template driven–by far the most important feature for me, as a designer.

At work (I’m a defense contractor) SCORM compliance is a big deal. Tonight I disovered (via Seb’s Open Research) Workforce Connections, a GPL ‘ed CMS that is made to be SCORM compliant. I’m going to have to give this a test install. If it’s easy to use, this could make life much better at work. It’s based on Zope and runs on Linux with Apache.

Recently I also discovered CMS Matrix which is a site that, though sponsored by WebGUI, attempts to give an objective comparision of the different major content management systems avaiilable. It’s a great resource.

Other good sites are OpenSourceCMS which lets you try the various content managment systems before you install them and CMS Info which keeps you up to date on the latest and greatest in CMS’s.

By John Lund and Pamela Pfiffner. Photoshop compositing starts off giving some interesting perspectives and ideas on how to build (including tips on taking the photos) maintain a library of photographs that could turn out invaluable in future compositing projects. The book talks about John Lund’s work style, technique and computer setup, and has some interesting insight on what works for him and even on what he could do better if he was so inclined.

Once the book gets into the actual details of retouching, the real fun (and work) begins. Lund’s attention to detail is spectacular. He notices everything, and in turn points out how to fix it. Don’t expect to jump in and have a great composited image in an hour or two, his techniques are very precise, professional and more often than not, time consuming.

The final chapter goes through several images he created in the past and gives some useful insight on how they were created and what inspired them.

Most of the book is written in 3rd person, I’m guessing Pamela Pfiffner sat down and had some detailed interviews with Lund and wrote it from what she gathered. While this doesn’t really detract from the content of the book, in my opinion, it doesn’t flow as well as it might if it had been written in first person.

This book is geared toward the professional Photoshop user who has a decent amount experience and would like to avoid some trial and error and get straight to results in the area of compositing.

By Scott Kelby. The Photoshop CS Book for digital photographers is a great book. As a long-time user of Photoshop, I wasn’t sure if there would be a whole lot of new material here, but I was happy to find the book is replete with techniques and tips that I would have never come up with on my own, as well as better ways of doing things that I had already been doing the “hard way.”

Among the chapters I found useful were the chapters on color correction; which go into great detail on how to use and understand curves, including providing default settings that will get you started on the right foot. Towards the end of the book there are some great techniques on helping your photographs have that “stock photography look” — depth of field effects, layer masking for collages and replicating photography filters.

The writing style is enjoyable, the steps are clearly laid out with screenshots and the full-color, intuitive layout of the book leaves little to be desired.

Not only will this book help you improve your Photoshop skills, it will help you have a better eye for what can be improved in your photographs. I often found that the techniques to correct photos were things I had never considered, not because they were difficult or obscure but, simply because I hadn?t noticed that my photos had the problems in the first place.

One thing to note is that if you own the previous version of this book, The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, the majority of the content is the same. There is a new section on the improved file browser and a few other new pieces, but it’s not really worth it to get a new copy since a large portion of it is the same.

By Derek Franklin/Jobe Makar. I’ve spent the last month and a half developing the interface and structure for a new, fairly large CD based training piece that is to be done in Flash. Flash MX 2004 Actionscript training from the Source, though not necessarily intended to be a reference guide, has been a great resource.

Each time I came upon an obstacle in my project and consulted the book, I was pleased to find that there was example code and an explanation that helped me solve the problem I faced. I was repeatedly surprised at the scope of the book–for every problem I encountered there was at least some coverage or direction in the book. I should note that I consider myself to be an expert Flash user, but only a beginner to intermediate Actionscript programmer.

The book is set up in several lessons (21) that are supposed to take about an hour each to complete. While I did not progress through the book lesson by lesson, I found that using the source files on the CD as well as the text of the book, I was able to extract the information I needed fairly easily.

I recommend this book to anyone with a basic knowledge of Flash who would like to become proficient in ActionScript and is willing to take some time to progress through the lessons.

Looking back on my day today, I realize that my design process has changed a lot over the past few years. In the past, I spent about 75% of my time working with graphics in Photoshop, Illustrator or with animations in Flash and the other 25% of my time in Dreamweaver or Flash writing the HTML or ActionScript to get them to look decent in a browser.

Lately, things have changed. Today I spent pretty much the entire day at work in jEdit trying to hack out ActionScript to basically dynamically create the graphics in Flash that before I would have just drawn. At home I spent the evening learning (finally) some of the more advanced CSS techniques so my HTML could move towards being standards compliant. By the looks of it, being standards compliant is going to mean spending a lot more time in the code view of Dreamweaver.

Ahhh well, I can’t say I don’t enjoy writing code, but I do miss the simpler times of doing most of my work with the pen tool or photographs. In the end I think the change is worth it.