Marcus Vorwaller

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.

Windows Movie Maker 2 (which comes in an update to Windows XP) is really not a bad movie making program. I have heard surprisingly little about it, so for a long time, I didn’t even try clicking the icon to see what it did. Once I finally decided to give it a whirl, I was surprised at its usefulness.

The project I wanted to do was just to take a folder of still images and create a video slideshow with music in the background. It turns out there’s a Wizard built in to do just that. Basically I just had to open the wizard, select the folder, select the song, select a style and click “create movie.” That’s it… it was done. Windows Movie Maker automatically creates the slideshow to the length of the song and throws in some nice default transitions.

Once it’s done, you can either save it and have a decent movie done in about 15 minutes, or go in and add from the impressive selection of transitions and titling effects to customize the movie.

There are however, as with most Microsoft programs, some caveats. Windows Movie Maker won’t even run on my Dell laptop. I tried some troubleshooting (updating my video card drivers etc) but it just keeps crashing. It runs perfectly on my MUCH older P II 450 Gateway desktop–even with such an antiquated processor, it is able to render the transitions in realtime.

Creating a similar movie in Premier or another, more advanced video editing application such as Final Cut would have taken much longer to get the desired effect. Between tweaking the length of transitions and the time pictures are shown on the stage, creating a simple slideshow (even using the storyboarding features) can become a much more involved process. I haven’t compared it to iMovie yet, but I imagine it has similar features.

If you have Windows XP and want to make simple videos, I suggest checking out Windows Movie Maker. If it doesn’t crash on your machine, you might just find you really like it.

For an example of the type and quality of slideshow it produces, check out this movie I created today (11.6mb wmv format).