sky from my room…

  never really understood the power of image editing until now. While trying the camera on monotonous sky got very dull pictures and I was about to delete them. Then I thought to try out some image editing products to see the results. Played with

• fill light
• highlights
• shadow
• color temparature
• saturation and
• tint

here are the results – before and after -

it has made me lazy also. Now I just get the object into frame and shoot, whatever be the conditions, light direction etc. It may look like crap to a professional but most of the things which can be noticed by a beginer like me can be corrected by software now.

lost in transition from windows to mac? here are few tips …

was like a lost man when I got my mac. had used windows all my life. Looking back following tips could have saved my day -

1 – > How can I select files.Where is File Explorer on mac - Finder is explorer for you on Mac. and you can find what you called accessories in windows in Applications->utilities

2 – > There is a single menu bar on mac for every application. The items changes when a application is selected.

3 – > I got a crash on application and I want to kill it . where is task manager on macintosh - go to finder > applications > utilities > Activity monitor

4 – > how can i restart my mac machine - go to top left corner of menu bar where you can find apple icon . Click on that . You have restart > shutdown

5 – > how can I right click the mouse -

• Press Control key and click mouse
• Go to apple menu and Click System Preferences menu. Choose Keyboard and mouse. Choose mouse tab in the dialog that comes.
• Select right of the mouse as “Secondary button”. Now on you can use the right click. but beware sometimes it is so sensitive that left click will be treated as right click and the item “Move to trash” is very near to be hit. I lost many files in begining – did not know what is happening.  in windows you get “deleting ….” dialog. even if you select large files it happens so quickly without any indication that you are losing your files

suddenly mac looked easy when it dawned on me that Command key is same as Control key on windows. But this joy was shortlived till I went back to windows and on hunt for the old Control key. and I shifted all my file search related operations to mac when I saw the speed of file search.

ps : the awkward position of the images in this post is due to unpredictable behaviour of wordpress images alignment or my ignorance of how it works. Till now I was using left aligned but when it went out of control I tried No alignment and the results are still a bit from what I wanted.

adobe captivate 4 is released…

Adobe Captivate 4 is released to public. You can read about the pricing details, feature set and videos here

It seems yesterday that Adobe Captivate 3 was released.  Here are my four favourite features to justify a upgrade -

Enhance content - For end users most of the appeal comes in how the content looks. And most of us ended up going to other products to spruce up our content and present it in better way. Now all of this could be done with aggregator and Table of content feature.

 

 

 

Extend content - Most of us used Captivate since long and were almost stuck somewhere about its abilities. We wished some new type of objects or questions could be there. We wished to extend Captivate. Now with Widgets we can create any new type of object, question slides, new buttons etc and it will all follow all the the rules inside Captivate like responding to success/failure, participating in quizzes , adhering to LMS etc. With this probably we would never need to file a enhancement report to Captivate. And with variables and scripting I am yet to gauge fully its power in controlling the content yet following all the business logic of Captivate and eLearning.

 

Collaborate for content- In a large organization we needed to get inputs from various stakeholders about the content we created. Now we have Adobe Captivate commenting feature. Try it out to see the time it saves and the value it brings. If none of these are interesting we could just distribute the file for viewing. It looks so good that people will not stop seeing it.
 

 

 

 

Reuse content - And who says flash based tools are needed for creating e learning courses. Most of us had content in PowerPoint and though Captivate provided a way to insert them inside Captivate file we still needed to go back and forth between applications if we wanted to modify content. Now we can work on PowerPoint content from within Captivate.

And these are just part of complete feature set. Keep an eye on these spaces for more information on these features in coming days.

flower blooms in my balcony …

my balcony is facing north direction due to which it recieves no sunlight in winters. This is particularly hard on the plants which are there. When they first come they are full of colors but due to absence of sunlight they lose all their colors very soon. the one seen here is a flower blooming in my balcony garden despite all the hardships.

The chances of its getting sunlight increases after 14th Jan which is day when sun begins its journey towards northwards or in simple terms – transition of Sun into Capricorn on its celestial path. It is still few days when it is to see its first sunlight after months.

use youtube videos inside adobe captivate

for Adobe Captivate 3 users one of the wishes would be how can they insert youtube videos inside their Captivate project file. Here are the ways you can do it.

• this is based on the documentation YouTube ActionScript 2.0 Player API Reference. Visit this page for some more guidelines about using it for loading multiple videos and unloading etc.
• Open a flash actionscript 2.0 file. Copy the code from the page mentioned  above under the example section and paste to the flash file you have just created. Make following changes -
  1. var ytplayer:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip(“ytplayer”, 1);
     change this line to var ytplayer:MovieClip =  createEmptyMovieClip(“ytplayer”, 1); as captivate gives warning about using _root in the swf being inserted.
  2. go to www.youtube.com and locate the video you want to insert into Captivate project file.
  3. locate the url of that video – it will be in format of http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=SaBb8Wi25Pg
  4. copy the text marked in red – it uniquely identifies  the video on youtube
  5. switch to your actionscript code
  6. Replace the text copied in earlier step 4 with VIDEO_ID in the statement ytPlayerLoader.loadClip(“http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID“, ytplayer);
  7. Save the flash file. Publish it to swf. For best results change the document size of flash to 480 x 385 pixels
  8. Open Captivate. Choose Insert – > Animation . Locate the swf file you published in previous step 7 and insert it.
  9. Now insert a button on the same slide so that Captivate movie will pause at that slide till the time user clicks. So that they can view the video before moving to next slide.
  10. Publish the Captivate project and you will see and can play the video

Pros -

• totally seamless
• you need not use those tools to download video files from youtube to your machine and probably face copyright issue
• no copyright issue as video is being played from youtube site

Cons -

• You have to manually specify the video ID and regenerate swf before using it in captivate.
• this is just a proof of concept. It has many bugs like audio not stopping when you move to next slide, video in some stage when you rewind to the slide containing it and possibly many more. But it is all possible by changing the actionscript code by unloading the video properly.
• you have to add button for slide to pause

ps : watch out for next posts -

• use flickr apis to create slideshows which fetches data from flickr. Use Flash to create the animation which can be used inside captivate.
• some improvemets on youtube sample
• and wait you have a better and elegant solution waiting when Adobe Captivate 4 is released. Update 1 - read step by step guide to create youtube widget for Adobe Captivate 4

year gone by and resolutions…

another year has passed. Our annual shutdown has just ended, actually it has been a week but I am realising it now on the eve of another day of holiday. During it I

• took rest
• completed unfinished books of last year. they were -
  • Himalaya – by Michael Palin – travelogue tracing himalaya from west to east
  • Multiple city – writings on bangalore – edited by Aditi De
  • Banker to the poor – by Muhammad Yunus
  • The Kalam Effect – My years with the president – by P M Nair
  • The motorcycle diaries – Ernesto “Che” Guevara – could not pick the momentum to finish it
• My Canon SLR was gathering dust since years after film rolls were out of fashion and memories began to exist only digitally.
• found renewed interest in photography after a friend gifted Sony digital camera. Below are some of the early samples. Click to go to flickr to see them in better size-

and few new year resolutions related to this blog. This space has been two years in running and was created as part of one of the new year resolution- 

• blog more often
• change the way I blog so that it is more interesting for few people
• more instantaneous fresh topics. In most of the cases the content is stale and very late.
• and put more photographs since I have a digital camera now