Blog for Life Long Learners

Timeline for 20 years of Photoshop

Adobe’s Online Launch Event  gave me a quick overview of the snazzy new features that Adobe has added to Photoshop in its 20th anniversary year. The repeated emphasis on the huge time savings of 64-bit computing worried me. Would I need a new computer to use Photoshop CS5?

Creative Suite 5, including Photoshop, works fine with a 32-bit processor and a 32-bit operating system. A 32-bit operating system can address only 4 GB of RAM at a time, but that’s enough for many Photoshop users. Certainly enough for me.

However, you now can buy  64-bit Mac OSX Snow Leopard and 64-bit Windows 7. With an Intel Quad Core Processor in your Mac or PC, you can add up to 32 GB of RAM. That’ll make for mighty fast filtering, rendering, etc.

There’s one iMac that you can pack with 16 GB of RAM for an accessible price. If  intensive processing power enables you to work faster and if you have plenty of projects, you’ll be delighted to upgrade to 64-bit computing and the 64-bit applications in CS5, especially if you’re using Photoshop Extended.

Flash CS5 Professional now works better with Adobe graphics software, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. The FXG graphics format translates exports from those core products to language that Flash, Flash Catalyst, Flex, and humans can understand.

For a clear and helpful explanation see James Pollanc’s Understanding FXG, a primer on Adobe’s new graphics file format in the August 2009 issue of Adobe’s Edge online Newsletter. The illustration for this blog comes from that Edge as well.

Most surprising: New Text Engine
A new text engine gives you print quality typography and way more control over text. Use the new Flash CS5 Text Layout Framework to flow text from one linked box to another.

3 New Aids for ActionScripters
The new Code Snippets Panel provides you with prebuilt code for often-used ActionScript.

An improved ActionScript editor, with custom class code hinting and code completion

Integration with Flash Builder 4, formerly known as Flex Builder. Use it as your primary editor for Actionscript, especially if you develop Rich Internet Applications. Learn more.

Most Fun for Animators
New Spring for Bones. Think boing-boing. Add Spring to your Bones for bounce-back effects. 

More Flash CS5 features at
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/whatsnew/

Download the Flash CS5 trial
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/?promoid=BPDEE

Check out the Flash CS5 Systems Requirements for PCs and Macs at
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/systemreqs/

I first saw a prototype for Flash Catalyst at Adobe Max in 2008 in San Francisco. We saw a designer make static Photoshop and Illustrator comps interactive— without coding. Then we cheered.

Flash Catalyst is shipping now. Adobe promises that you can use it to create “fully interactive website navigation elements complete with rollovers.”

I’m eager to hear what designers say once they download the free 30-day trial and try to ease into making their own Photoshop and Illustrator assets interactive.

Learn more
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashcatalyst/

Download the free trial.
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flash_catalyst

Play!

Edward Tufte with book in hand

Although Edward Tufte is a man of many parts, he’s best known for teaching others to use graphic design to bring clarity to complex data. I was introduced to his work by Janet Hansen, who was his student in a post-graduate course at Yale.  Most of us know his principles of graphic design from his six books. Here are three of them

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, his first book and still my favorite– Click on the link to go to Amazon. Use “Look Inside” and search for “Napoleon” to see the graphic, drawn in 1861 by engineer Charles Joseph Minard.  Tufte’s  Verdict: “It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” or go to http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Results, This 32-page PowerPoint book is #3 PowerPoint book in sales on Amazon.
• Beautiful Evidence, I love the wonderful examples Tufte uses to illustrate his points. Beautiful Evidence includes Galileo’s series of hand-drawn images of sunspots.

Tufte’s Role on the Recovery.com Accountability and Transparency Board

In a recent NPR interview, Tufte explained,… “our eye-brain system is so powerful, in one long glance, maybe a 12-second glance at something, probably 120 megabits of information goes to our brain.”

March 19, 2010, Edward Tufte Interview about the recovery site on NPR

Read the transcript

Hans Rosling of Gapminder at Ted-India 2009

The Economist: Managing Information
I finally got read the special section on Managing Information in the February 27, 2010 issue of The Economist. They reported on new tools we can use for data visualization and listed several software tools now available. I looked first at Gapminder. Google purchased  Gapminder’s Trendalyzer in 200

The best way to “get” Gapminder is to watch a video of its developer, Hans Rosling of Sweden, speaking at TED-India 2009. Starting in the year 1858, Rosling— speed-talking like a horse race announcer— tracks the rise, year by year of India and China in health, measured in life expectancy, and wealth, measured in per capita income.

http://bit.ly/ddSJZz

Compelling Data
Rosling is a dynamite speaker. In his hands Gapminder is a sledge hammer that jarred me with data visualized so clearly that it tells a compelling story. He shows Washington, DC breaking the bounds of his chart in wealth while its health statistics are lower than those of Kerala, India.

Embarrassing, isn’t it?

To learn more, go to www.Gapminder.org. Open Gapminder World to see the animated chart Rosling created for his talk. See the TTeacher tab to download many Gapminder charts for free as well as a PDF Guide.

Google bought Gapminder. To make your own interactive charts, follow these directions from  comments on the Gapminder site.

“You can create your own graphs but you need to do that using Google Docs. Google bought the technology behind the Gapminder graphs. You need to create a spreadsheet in Google Docs, then you need to go to the Insert menu, then choose Gadget, and then choose Motion Chart.”

Find a Quick Guide to Motion Chart

Thanks to Wikipedia for making this image available

I first saw Guy Kawasaki on stage at a Macromedia User Conference in San Francisco in the 90s. He’s a great speaker, very funny, and “eat your own dog food” was graphic and memorable.

For example if you created Myst–a 90s game that absolutely wowed me with its graphics– it was not enough to marvel at its wonders on your souped-up computer and graphics card. You had to try it on the kind of computer the hoped-for customer might actually have.

In my case, eating my own dog food means taking a Connect Learning class and seeing how much value it brings me. Last week I attended our two-day Social Media Marketing class. I really enjoyed interacting with the other participants,  and I’m so full of new ideas that I had to write down which 10 to do first. The true test of value will come a month from now when I see how much I’ve actually implemented and the early* results I’ve gotten.

* I shouldn’t expect much in the way of results after only a month. We’ll see April 10.

Saturdays from 8:00 – 9:00 a.m. I have a conversation in Spanish with Héctor Garcia. Héctor lives in Antigua, Guatemala, and I live in Houston, Texas. I can actually have a conversation in Spanish now (unless I panic). The hour is a bright spot in my week.

Saturdays we both fire up OoVoo* and our cost-effective (cheap) headsets and web cams. Body language and facial expressions matter. Ask any poker player. Along with Spanish. I’m learning about the intriguing Guatemalan culture and giving my brain exercises and stretches.

Antigua has always specialized in learning vacations for future Spanish speakers, and colleges there prepare graduates to teach Spanish as a second language. You can help yourself to a learning vacation without leaving the country.

Héctor’s company, Internet Spanish, offers one-on-one conversational Spanish at an accessible price. Send an email to info@internetspanish.net to request a free introductory conversation with Héctor Garcia.
http://www.internetspanish.net

*OoVoo’s streaming video is gorgeous and the sound is excellent. Sign up for a free subscription for two-person video and audio conversations.   http://www.oovoo.com/Home.aspx

Flash & Math's ActionScript Applets for Math and Science

The Flash and Flex Developer’s Magazine has great links. It’s hard for me to think of them as ads. The Flash and Math link waylaid me today. I love the idea of math made visual.

The Flash & Math site displays the handiwork of Douglas Ensley and Barbara Kaskosz. They’ve created a series of Flash and Math applets, designed to teach ActionScript 3 to math and science teachers. The lessons use the step-by-step style of their popular online tutorials. According to Amazon, “the Flash and Math site has millions of page requests every year” from Flash developers of all kinds.

They’ve published the applets as a book with 17 chapters. To interact with a completed example, try the interactive map with imported graphics from Chapter 13.

Connect Learning’s
Adobe Flash CS4 Bootcamp 5 days
Greg Smith’s next class
Meets March 15 – 19, 2010
Sign up now. Flash Bootcamp limited to 8.

Chitika serves ads to blogs

Can you say Chitika quickly four times without saying Chiquita? I can’t.

I’ve learned a little more about Chitika ads. Their site says chikita means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu a South Indian language. The name was chosen to convey how quickly clients can post an ad with Chikita.

However, they have pictures of bananas scattered throughout their site for those of us who, hearing Chitika, want to spell it Chiquita. It looks like by next year it’ll also mean how quickly clients start making money on their blogs by using Chikita.

In my last blog about Chikita I registered my surprise at seeing an ad featuring the Darren Rowse, the Pro Blogger, on La Prensa Libre´s web site. Greg Smith suggested that the ad was displayed for me. I read La Prensa Libre, I use information and tutorials from the Adobe site.  And I downloaded some good advice from the Pro Blogger site last week.

I like to see targeted ads. I dislike seeing automaton ads. If I type Telugu in Google search , I don´t like seeing ads down the right side of my screen that say Find Telugu for less at MassMerchandiser.com.

Chikita has attracted interest because they play well with Google’s AdSense. The neat twist for you as a Chitika ad buyer is that the ads won’t show up on your blog when it goes to your subscribers. It only appears to people who have found you through a Search Engine like Google, Yahoo or Bling.