September 27, 2005
A good tutorial on making platform game
kirupa.com - Creating a Platform Game
September 22, 2005
Computer games to teach programming
Wired News: C'mon Kids, Let's Play Programmer - an article from wired about a computer game to teaching programming skills. Maybe I could use this as part of the actionscripting course.
September 20, 2005
A cool for online typography
Typetester %u2013 Compare fonts for the screen - a really nice online tool for comparing what fonts look like. Includes leading and word space.
September 19, 2005
Flash tutorials
Smart Tutorials in Flash and Actionscript - need to make sure the 1st years get this URL.
AIGA - Professional Practices
AIGA - Professional Practices - more resources for the communication/project management course.
Motion Graphcs Portfolio.
Belief | Broadcast Design & Live Action Studio Normallly you would expect a portfolio like this to made flash, instead it a "flash like" interface made in HTML. The process section is great, includes images of sets and software demo's.
September 17, 2005
Steps to Becoming a Freelance Web Developer
Garrett Dimon: Steps to Becoming a Freelance Web Developer - Dimon gives a really great summary of the step involved in setting up as freelance web developer. I know it's in there, but there is not a lot of focus on getting clients which is the key !!!!
September 16, 2005
A couple of breeze session on Flash Communication server
Building a Blog-Comments App with FlashCom and Perl
PCC_ClipManager - think this is the start of a message board.
Web 2.0 for Designers
Digital Web Magazine - Web 2.0 for Designers a great summary of Web 2.0. I'm about to post to my students webCT news.
Articles from Digital Web Magazine on softskills for designer
Digital Web Magazine - Articles by Topic : Client Management
Digital Web Magazine - Articles by Topic : Business
Digital Web Magazine - Articles by Topic : Web Teams
All of Eric Adams Creative Pro articles
creativepro.com - Eric J. Adams - Creativepro.com Authors - Adams seems to write most of the business and client articles for Creative Pro.
September 15, 2005
Flash Game tutorials
|| Artifact Interactive || Tutorials || - These are for Flash 5, which is a real shame : - ( because they look good.
Communication Arts: Interactive
Communication Arts: Interactive 2005 Winners I ned to get back to this soon !!!!
September 12, 2005
Animated Christmas Cards
Complete collection of Jacquie Lawson animated e-cards
Christmas greeting cards at cartoonsoup.com
Vodcastings, Screencasting or whatever you would like to call and WebCT.
What is it?
A system that allows me to record software demonstrations during face to face sessions with students and then deliver these to students via webCT and RSS feeds. This means if a student misses a session they can watch the video files !!! And it also means I'm building up a collection of resources that I can make available to future students.
How it works
1) Recording
I have a microphone attached to the computer that is also attached to the data projector. The microphone sits above the monitor. It would be better if it was a wireless tie-mic because I would get a cleaner sound. I record the sessions using Windows Media Encoder. I started using the default screen recording settings in Windows Media Encoder and these made great quality small files but didn't work on Macs. I have now built my own template that works OK with Macs but the quality is not so great.
Some of the guidelines I use are
- I try to make sure each demo is only short.
- I don't use this in the early stages of the course because I find that students are a bit quiet when they know a session is being recorded.
- I try and include the question and answer sessions.
What I used to find is that it would take ages for me to get the files up on to WebCT, and students really need the files ASAP. The solution below is what I've come up with.
2) At the end of the day I use Windows Media Player to edit the meta data on the files.
3) I store all the files in one folder, on the WebCT server. This folder is then set up so that students don't need to login to access the folder. This is done by:
- Creating a sub-directory of the course root directory (webct\webct \user\course_id)
- Copying the .htaccess file from the course root directory into the sub-directory.
- Remove the line require valid-user in the .htaccess file (thank you to Stephen for this) Your WebCT system administrator might need to do this.
4) I then use a piece of software called Weed Exporter and a RSS template I wrote to generate a RSS feed from the meta data on the Windows Media Files.
5) I then upload the RSS feed and the new Windows Media Files.
6) To get the RSS feed looking like a normal page in WebCT I use the Feed2JS service.
7) Then the students can download the files from the page that is generated by Feed2JS or they can subscribe to the RSS feed.
What I personally love about the system is all that I have to do is write or edit the meta data and then the RSS feed and HTML page is built from that.
What needs to be worked on is getting the dates off the files with Weedexporter. Also at this stage I'm also not sure how many students are actually using the system.
Update: 14/September/2004
In the new beta version of weed export Christopher Stewart has added created and modified dates to the fields that can be accessed !!! Which solves the date problem.
Peer to Peer Screen Sharing
Qnext > Home - doesn't have mac version yet. As I'm reading about it I'm wondering what there business model is.
Searchable Flash
From the site "Ripple is an open-source framework, whose primary objective is to make Flash content searchable by search engines."
September 10, 2005
The monster client
Creative Behavior - Articles - How to Manage the Monster - Project Management for The Freelance Designer - Project management for the freelance designer and how to deal with the monster client.
New Media syllabi
del.icio.us/marisaolson/syllabi - not much use for current teaching but it might be useful in the future.
September 09, 2005
An example Dreamweaver course summary
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 website design training course - Perth, Australia
Dreamweaver/Web Design Reflections.
It's been a while since I have sat down and actually written any notes or
reflections. I'm currently on a break from teaching and now seems to be a good
time to think about some of my recent teaching that has just come to an end.
I wonder how many times it's takes to do things where the teaching for it actually
work !!!! Last year the web design section of the course wasn't great, I didn't
feel happy with it. The problem was that first project was to advanced for
most students. (the project was the CSS Zen Garden). This year I did two projects
before the CSS project, one was simple task based and the other one as a simpler
CSS project.
Here is a few questions and notes about the approach I took this year.
- A lot of the projects/tasks are about redesign processes, which is something
that is not easy, but does reflect current industry work. Maybe redesign
processes could happen later. - I personally have a huge amount of knowledge
about the area and I'm feeling it's a bit hard to understand the point
of view of a start learner at the start. - Dreamweaver is a huge program,
to make things easier I've tried to cut down what the students needed to
do. Maybe what they lacking is an overview of the application. - I've been
avoiding hand coding, but maybe that is the basics that the students are
missing. - For the people that where having problems the step by step demonstrations
and handouts where useful. But I think only 20% of students used the handouts.
One of the problems with Dreamweaver is that there is many ways to do things. - The application is not truly what you see is what you get. This is an important
thing for students to learn, but is frustrating. (Maybe this needs to be
made into an competition, eg biggest stuff up). - I'm tempted to break it
down into small tasks, but I don't want to break it up to much.
Maybe the task sequence could be
- Making a new page design via hand coding (with step by step supports)
Make this nice and quick. - Fixing up mistakes in some existing pages.
- An overview of what Dreamweaver
can do (maybe this could done as small research projects by the students) - A series of small jacks tasks on CSS design techniques and other HTML techniques
(with step by step supports). I'm moving towards making these in mini technical
problems. - A case study on web site development processes. What do this
students do ? - A project to make a simple new site (only give the students
a short amount of time and make it simple) - Project to redesign webCT stylesheet's
- Project to redesign Zen Garden
- Bush Foods Project, or a real project
Which means putting more learning tasks in before the projects, and might
mean removing the webCT stylesheet project.
I have to remember that a large part of what students want from f2f courses
is the social aspects, but I do find it difficult that when students are having
problems if they go off and find other resources then normally it all becomes
clear to them.
I should also add the many of students have been having trouble balancing work loads at TAFE and part-time jobs.
September 08, 2005
Open source screen sharing
Finally an open source screen sharing system !!! it's only in beta and the last release was a year ago. Which isn't positive, it looks like it needs jboss on the server.
Trends in web design
creativepro.com - The Art of Business: Internet Design and Development Today
Summary
- data and interactive data display skills are more important than visual design skills
- video skills for the web are becoming more important
- being a small business is becoming more difficult
- there is still alot uncertainty in the industry
September 07, 2005
stuff for the roleplay
creativepro.com - The Art of Business: A Designer's Bill of Rights - hmm some of this could be written into the client student roleplays.
Another example using stories
Boxes and Arrows: An introduction to user journeys - an example of using stories to communicate needs.
Background not expanding
I'm writing this down because I'm sure I will forgot it.
There was a div the wrapped around all the content on a page it was centred and was meant to be the background for the page. But it wasn't expanding to fix the content it was always to short. The solution ended up being adding a footer div that has set to clear both.
CSS style switcher
The CSS style switcher is a combinatinon of A List Apart: Articles: Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets and Javascript Stylesheet Switcher
Mailing list solution
Email Newsletter and List Management Software for Web Designers - Campaign Monitor - looks good and looks simple to use. Personally I also like the pricing model.
September 06, 2005
Camtasia and Flash
Live Screen capture with Camtasia and Flashcom - example file of using Camtasia with Flash com . This could be a good start to screen sharing tool I'm after.
September 05, 2005
Young Business
Catapult (ABC Online) - ideas, information and business tips for young entrepreneurs
I've hear some of these on the radio and it now great to have found them !!!! It is a great resource that could be good to direct students towards.
September 04, 2005
1st person game creator
FPS Creator - Let's make some games... From the site "First Person Shooters are one of the most enduringly popular game genres. Now, for the first time, anyone can make their own action packed FPS games without any programming or 3D modelling knowledge" hmm but how could turn client interaction and business development for designers into a FPS ?
September 03, 2005
A good tutorial on making a flash based site
kirupa.com - Creating a Full Flash Site
September 01, 2005
Text wrap in tables
There are things that I seem to forget and this is one of them. When you want text wrap in table cell, all the table cells need widths. The mistake I keep on making is that my test text is just a line of repeated letters and needs spaces (eg real words to work).