Alex Silver
Alex's background in the technology industry goes back over 20 years, during which time he has worked for organisations such as the Metropolitan Police, Plessey Naval Systems, and Abbott Mead Vickers.
Alex has been a fulltime instructor with Highlander for a number of years, having been involved in training for the last 15 years, and is a regular contributor to beta programmes for Adobe's core products.
Alex is an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, ActionScript and DreamWeaver. In addition he also teaches courses on CSS, Fireworks, Quark, PHP and MySQL.
In training, I frequently create examples on my mac, get them working, tweak them, and then copy them over to my trainees pcs. In doing so, I have come across a few problems that I thought I would share with you, and the solutions (not perfect) that I have used to fix these issues.
What I normally do is create a new Actionscript project on my mac. Create and test the files and get everything ready for the training.
Then I copy the whole project folder onto a training pc, and sometimes I end up with problems. For example… Read more...
I love Blender, and with the advent of Blender 2.5 alpha 2 I have been working through lots of tutorials to get up to speed with its new features (of which there are many). Here is a list of tutorial sites that I would recommend to everyone who is serious about 3D modelling. Most of these you have to pay for, but they are well worth it.
CGCookie Blender
http://www.blendercookie.com/
Lots of great tutorials, going through creating a dragon, showing how to model a hand, head, eyeball, porsche, a mechanic, and many other tips and techniques and shapes. Read more...
What can HTML5 and CSS do? Here are a list of HTML5/CSS3 experiments that I have come across. Have a look, they are great fun.
A solar system…
http://neography.com/experiment/circles/solarsystem/
Blowing up video…
http://www.craftymind.com/2010/04/20/blowing-up-html5-video-and-mapping-it-into-3d-space/
Leopard style stack example…
http://gordonbrander.com/lab/css3-stacks/#stack
Harmony…
http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/#shaded
Fishtank…
http://gregmurray.org/fish/
Canvas molecules…
http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/
As I find new ones I will post them, but if anyone knows of any others, let me know and I will add them to the list.
Using Flash Builder a lot as I do I am always on the look out for new extensions. Recently I came across a lovely new extension from Adobe. It is called Blueprint.
Blueprint – a Flash Builder Extension, allows you to search the web for examples of code, directly within Flash Builder.
For example, suppose you are tweening and want to see what examples you can find regard the Tween class. Just highlight Tween and press CTL-B (Mac) or Alt – B (PC).
This brings up the Blueprint panel, with the search results.
Read more...
With InDesign CS5 you get a lovely new tool, the Gap tool. Basically it allows you to manipulate the gaps between boxes, thereby changing the size of the boxes themselves.
For example, if you layout eight rectangles and, using InDesign’s gap tool, you can change the position of the gaps between each set of frames, whilst the frames resize.
By default, it will move the gap that you have. However you can also…
…use the gap tool between frames and the edge of the page Read more...
With the recent advent of all the hoopla over flash and html 5 and the iphone/ipad, I decided to go back to Javascript and have a look to see what is around.
I was particularly looking for Javascript libraries to help me with the new drawing features for HTML5 etc, and in my research I came across three that I think are well worth further investigation…
jQuery
jQTouch
Raphael
Now I am sure there are more out there, and I would love to hear from anyone as to what Javascript tools/libraries do you use, but the three above I was particularly taken with and so I recommend to everyone, have a look and let me know what you think. Read more...
Blender is a fantastic program – I love it. It is an open source, 3D package that does so much more.
However, there are several scripts that you can use to really help you create things within Blender. These Blender scripts are also free, and are created in Python. Here is a list of Blender scripts that I would recommend everyone check out…
Trees
Blender people
Cloud generator
Dungeon generator
Suicidator city engine
Have fun!
ByteArrays are very useful. I use them when saving image data out in the form of jpgs or pngs. You can also use them with sound data.
However someone recently asked me what about video? Can we use them to hold video data?
Well, pre-flash player 10.1 the answer is no. But now with flash player 10.1 you can use ByteArrays and videos with Actionscript 3. The methods concerned are…
appendBytes()
appendBytesAction()
…running off the NetStream class. Read more...
Frequently when playing around with code I need an object to play around with. So I created a Ball.as class. This testing class for Actionscript 3 is useful because it will just create a ball, with a default size and colour, which I can override if I wish.
I have also given it a bounceEffect() and bounce() public methods.
These will give a bounce effect when it hits a boundary and the latter will make it move and bounce from the boundaries. The boundary at the moment is just stage.stageWidth and stage.stageHeight, but I plan on allowing an object to be sent so that the instance can use its hight and width as the boundaries for bouncing. Read more...
For ages when I train InDesign, I always get the question – once you have created a star or polygon within InDesign, can you change the number of sides/points afterwards. Each time I would tell the trainee – no.
I have never seen any documentation, notes, tips, etc that tell me this was possible.
However, I was playing around InDesign a couple of days ago, creating polygons, and I suddenly thought – what if i draw the shape, double-click on the polygon tool and change the number of sides, whilst my shape is still selected? Read more...
