One of our instructors and well known author David Powers, has just released his latest book “Adobe DreamWeaver CS5 with PHP” published by Adobe Press. The book is currently a very affordable £18.50 on Amazon, and is David’s 8th book on the subject of Web Development. David has had some great reviews on his previous books published by Friends of Ed and we’re sure this new one from Adobe Press will prove to be just as popular. He probably knows more about DreamWeaver than almost anybody we’ve ever met, and that’s saying something. Congratulations David.
Aug 252010
I’ve always favoured manual recording over automatic recording when capturing software-based tasks in Adobe Captivate. It gives me more control and allows me to be selective about which screens I capture.
When I upgraded to Captivate 5.0, I found that I had to change the way in which I do my manual recordings. This is because Captivate 5.0 captures the mouse position during manual recording rather differently than previous versions: when you press the screen is capured, and the current position of the mouse pointer is used as the destination for the movement of the mouse on that slide. In Captivate 4.0 and earlier, the position of the mouse when you pressed was used as the origin for the movement of the mouse on that slide.
Aug 022010
If you are using products such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, DreamWeaver, PHP or Blender then there are a number of new groups now available on LinkedIn which you might want to join.
For those who haven’t heard of LinkedIn before it is a business networking site with over 70 million members of all levels, and can be a great place to network, find new opportunities and learn from the community (plus it’s free).
The groups which have just gone live are listed below:
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…
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.
Jun 062010
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…
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.
May 152010
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.
Apr 122010
Flash Professional CS5 software is the industry-leading environment for interactive authoring and delivery of immersive experiences that present consistently across personal computers, mobile devices, and screens of virtually any size and resolution. 
Design expressive content, write code precisely and efficiently, and deliver superior-quality video to audiences practically everywhere.
A powerful new text engine, expanded support for mobile and consumer devices, and enhanced coding tools are among the new features in Adobe Flash Professional CS5 software, the industry-leading interactive authoring tool. Flash Professional CS5 offers unrivaled integration with Adobe Photoshop®,
Work visually or directly in code, develop with dynamic third-party application frameworks like WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal, and troubleshoot efficiently with CSS inspection tools. 
Simplify advanced website development with custom PHP code hinting. Work more securely in a team environment with enhanced support for Subversion® software. Integration with Adobe BrowserLab—a new Adobe CS Live online service*—gives you access to fast and accurate browser compatibility previews, including dynamic content and user-generated interactions.
As I mentioned previously, Box2DFlash 2.1 is quite different from previous versions of Box2DFlash.
The major differences that I have found so far, are related to how to setup your world and your bodies (bearing in mind that I have only just started with Box2DFlash, and do not know the previous versions).
It took me a while to get my head around the Box2DFlash 2.1 relationship between fixtures, shapes, and bodies.
Feb 162010
I recently decided to have a play with Box2DFlash. This is a port of a popular 2D physics engine that has been ported to Actionscript 3, Java, C#, etc.
A lot of games use Box2DFlash and so I thought it was about time to play around with it.
Also, i thought it would be a nice idea to blog about my progress. I will be using Flash Builder 4 (beta) to do all my work in, but the files can be used in Flash, or a.n.other development environment.
Firstly you will need to download the files from here…