I have been lazy at posting to this blog, but haven't been lazy about creating from free tutorials. Check these out. If you have a request, please let me know and I would love to create something for you.
These are also viewable in HD on the YouTube website.
Illustrator CS4 for Screen Printing:
Dynamic Link in Premiere Pro and AfterEffects - Part 1:
Dynamic Link in Premiere Pro and AfterEffects - Part 2:
I recently bought myself a quality USB mic from Amazon that includes a cool carrying case, stand, shock base and cable. It comes with Cakewalk for editing your audio, but I prefer using Adobe Soundbooth. The package is a great value and is really easy to setup.If used correctly, the quality is top-notch.
Check out this quick video demo about the mic I bought:
Looking for brightness and contrast in Illustrator? Look no further: Phantasm CS Plugins. These guys have a whole collection of plugins for Illustrator and their free trial comes with a brightness and contrast effect that doesn't expire.
The annual Adobe event, to connect with thousands of Adobe users, experts, and staff for four days of education and inspiration. Learn cutting-edge skills, explore emerging technologies, build valuable relationships, and ignite bold new ideas. This year’s program features a diverse schedule of sessions and labs, unique networking and social events, and presentations by industry luminaries. November 16 – 19 in San Francisco, CA. Learn more at www.max.adobe.com.
It is easy to create a greener office with Acrobat 9. I personally use it as much as possible to open faxed documents and fill out and sign forms. At Lumenbrite, we email invoices in PDF format, provide our customers with syllabus sheets in PDF, and store files on PDF. It's fast and cheap. We eliminate the need to print out on paper. We are able to work from anywhere without struggling with font issues and missing files within the documents we open. PDFs are all encapsulated documents.
If you have ever wanted to learn how to lessen the amount of paper used in your office as well as save time, now is your opportunity. We have a new course for Acrobat 9 called "Go Green" to share this knowledge with you in a formal class. Check it out here.
Also, just for fun, check out this video about why you need Acrobat:
Teaching can be tough. It is one thing to know a subject and another to be able to present, educate, train and possibly inspire. It also takes a special person with charisma, patience and determination. A good trainer must also be very well educated and able to relate this subject to the real world. I use this article for new instructors that I work with. I hope you find it as useful as I have. It has been a good resource to help me to craft my trade (teaching) and help regular people forge themselves into great instructors. Creating passionate users.
I am so excited about all of the new Web 2.0 technologies that I have been playing around with lately. Wanna play too?
Check out Photoshop.com/express and feast your eyes on great photo editing tool that will even bring in your Flickr images. This may be old news, but I lik-it-alot.
How about getting some work done with Acrobat.com. To mention a few things - it's a sort of free service that lets you use Buzzword (the online collaboration word processing app) and Share an online meeting space.
Then there's Premiere Express on Photobucket.com? Ok...it's not a full blown video editor, but still cool stuff. I made this super cheesy video: see video. Don't laugh - I built it in about 30 seconds. It's called a "Remix."
These are just a few to mention. Have some others? Let me know, I would love to see them!
Ever had to import a CSV file into MySQL? I recently had to study how to import a huge list into a client's database, but commas wouldn't do. The text copy of the fields had commas and was being parsed into different fields in the table :(. Anyway, here is the solution for this issue. It works wonderfully! Astrochimp » Export CSV with Any Delimiter
Be sure to tick the RDS option when you are setting up ColdFusion 8. I recently deselected this option for a basic ColdFusion class that I was teaching and things got ugly. First, the Java plug-in that runs in the CF administration won't work. You won't be able to path to a database file using the Java applet in the data source administrator! Dreamweaver also starts bugging out and won't setup properly. It will keep asking for an RDS password, even though RDS was not installed.
RDS is a good thing to have anyway. What is RDS? Remote Development Services, or RDS, enables applications such as Eclipse to browse available components and data structures of data sources on the ColdFusion server. You will be able to access your data sources to view your database tables and to build queries. Good stuff.
I have written an article(that should be up soon) for the Adobe Dev Connection site about CFEclipse and the CF8 Components for Eclipse.
My research into these programs has led me to one conclusion...CFEclipse is great stuff. By itself, you can build Coldfusion applications. Add the CF8 Components and you can use RDS tools that allow for query building and more. I was especially intrigued by the AJAX and FLEX wizards that are built off of Coldfusion. I know some folks don't like wizards, but the fact that you can get an open source application (Eclipse) and load it up with CFEclipse and the CF8 Components to build awesome turnkey Flex and AJAX applications with a few button clicks ...for free - is really impressive.
