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.

As a result, if I carry out a manual recording in Captivate 5.0 in the same way as I was accustomed to doing in Captivate 4.0 (by pressing immediately following each mouse click), the resulting movie shows mouse-over effects on menu items or other controls showing up too early, when the mouse begins to move towards the control.

The workaround is to do manual recordings slightly differently in Captivate 5.0: I now press immediately before each mouse click — and to avoid mouse-over effects showing up prematurely, I position the mouse slightly away from the control (just enough so that the mouse-over effect does not show) as I press . This requires me to adjust the position of the mouse on the resulting Captivate slides, and means that I have a little more work to do than when I did manual recording with Captivate 4.0 and earlier.

Another solution that I’m currently using is to do my manual recordings in Captivate 4.0, and then to open the resulting projects in Captivate 5.0 so that I can take advantage of some of the useful new features that the latest version offers.

-Matthew Ellison

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:

- UK Photoshop Users Groups
- UK InDesign Users Groups
- UK Illustrator Users Groups
- UK DreamWeaver Users Groups
- UK PHP Users Groups
- UK Blender Users Groups

It costs nothing to join the groups and hopefully they will become a useful skills / career development tool as more members join.

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…

I frequently copy a project and then paste it. then I re-name the project and also the main as file to the new project name. But doing this can cause problems sometimes…

…when copying and pasting projects you end up with copies of previous projects still in the bin-debug folder (which will bloat up your project size)

…and also there occasionally seems to crop up a problem whereby the project still looks for another as file (say Example13.as) when the project is Example15, and has been named as such, and the main application as file has been set as such. The project seems to get stuck.

So I found that if you go to Project > Clean… and clean your projects, this should get rid of most of your problems.

The main issue that I could not seem to get rid of (sometimes) is that when you go to the properties of your project and look at the Application ActionScript section – you get a link to the old as file. Flash Builder knows it has been deleted, but it is still there. If you remove it from the list, something in the project still looks for it, and refuses to run your application without it.

The only solution I found then was to create a brand new project, name it how you want, and then copy/paste your code over.

So cleaning your Flash Builder projects seems to help a lot with problems like these, but not always.

I hope this helps everyone who gets issues like those mentioned above, and if anyone has any better solutions let me know.

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.

They are also selling a very good, long, tutorial on creating a character…

http://www.blendercookie.com/2010-blender-training/

…where they go through modelling to materials, rigging, textures, animation, and lots more.  I am currently going through this myself and it is turning out to be a fantastic series. Not everything is finished yet, but if you buy the series, you will get access to everything as and when it appears – and new stuff seems to arrive about every week and there is already a fair amount there to go through.

Blender classroom

http://www.blenderclassroom.com/index.html

Nice collection of tips and tutorials.

Blender Guru

http://www.blenderguru.com/

A great site with great tutorials.  Learn how to create weather effects, high rise buildings, and more. One of the best Blender sites in my opinion.

Blender Guru’s WOW factor

http://www.wowfactorbook.com/

A great pdf book on using the compositor in Blender. A real must have. It goes through using the compositor to create various glow effects, vignettes, flares, and other image effects.

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.

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.

Now you will the results of a web search regarding the code you highlighted.

You can further refine your query by typing in additional terms, resize the Blueprint window to see more, and use the down arrow key to see the next example.

If you find something you like, just highlight it and press return and the code will be pasted into your file.

You do not have to highlight anything, you can just type something in a line and press CTL-B or just press CTL-B and type in something.

If you find something important, the current search can be pinned as a separate panel (just click on the pin icon top-right), so you can have it there permanently.

To install Blueprint just add the following to your software updates, as a new remote site…

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/blueprint/fb4/

… and install. Here are the installation instructions…

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Blueprint:Installation_Instructions

This looks like a lovely utility and seems to work well, I would advise everyone to try it out and see for yourself.

It looks like not everybody agrees with this position though and John Harding, Engineering Manager at YouTube, has written an interesting post on why “Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it”.  With Android now running Flash apps on mobile devices, and Chrome actively improving support for Flash it’s looks like plenty of people agree with John Harding on this, and whilst these examples are all Google based a quick search shows plenty more support from other companies as well.

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

…by default the gap tool will adjust a whole row/column, unless you hold down the SHIFT key – this will only adjust two frames, and ignore the others. Again it is just moving the gap.

…holding CMD/CTL will make the gap larger/smaller

…holding down CMD/CTL-ALT makes the gap larger/smaller and will move the frames, rather than resize them

However, in a training session a couple of weeks ago, someone asked can you actually specify a gap amount? i.e. 2.3 mm – and try as I might I could not find a way to make a gap an exact size (maybe using guides, but the whole point is to do without guides as much possible). But whilst investigating we came across this…

…Where does the original gap size come from? When you layout a set of frames with the arrow keys (draw a box and then right/up arrow to create more copies), they all have a gap, already set. Where does this come from?

Well it seems to come from the standard gutter setting when creating a new document. When you do File > New > Document, you will notice a gutter set to 4.233 mm, and when you create objects as already noted, the gap is also 4.233 mm.

Changing the gutter when creating a new document also changes the gap between frames when created in the manner described above. So at least you can change the gap setting – but we did not find a way to change the gap numerically.

So if anyone knows how to do this please let me know, or if you know of any other shortcuts when using the gap tool again let me know.

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.

Are there any other great Javascript libraries out there? let me know and I will post them up.