Archive for October, 2007
Like 2 million other people, I installed OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard) on my iBook this past weekend. The installation went smoothly. I made sure I removed lots of 3rd party toys I keep on my computer (ShapeShifter, FinderPop, etc.), and I made a clone of my HD using SuperDuper!.
I love having Spaces built in now rather than using a 3rd party app. In Safari you can control-click on anything on a web page and choose Inspect Element which pulls open a nifty tool. Screen sharing via iChat is sweet. Lots of things I really can’t live without (hmm…geek?).
Minor issues with my upgrade were with the web sharing. It now runs on Apache 2, so I had to edit my httpd.conf file sitting inside the apache2 folder to get php running again. Some of the permissions on mysql data also got lost, so had to tweek those.
Now, on to Director. I started it up and it seems to run with no problem, and something even got fixed! For years on OSX the little arrows on the floating windows pointed diagonally downward. They didn’t care if the window was open or closed. But now…look at the picture below! The little arrows actually point in a reasonable direction. GUI improvements on a very old program with a two day old operating system. Amazing. I’m so excited watching the little arrows move. The simple things in life 🙂
October 30th, 2007
For those that might be interested in watching the session, you can drop by and watch the entire sneak peek. It is a large FLV, so not sure how long I’ll get to keep it at that location. There is no audio at the start, and you have to really crank it up to hear things.
My poor little Mac Mini that hosts this site has been doing a bit of crashing lately due to lack of RAM. I plugged in the maximum 1 gig earlier this evening, so we’ll see how it goes. For the most part it is like one of those energizer bunnies and it just keeps going and going. Of course with OSX 10.4 and half a gig of ram it was just marginally sitting there with 12 meg free. Remember when that number was big…my how times have changed.
October 10th, 2007
The DevLearn 2007 Developers Conference started up today in conjunction with the Adobe Learning Summit. Dr. Ellen Wagner will be presenting several sessions at the conference. Two involve migrating from Authorware to other Adobe eLearning products. Dr. Wagner got a chance to speak during the BOF Director session at MAX 2007 where she talked about how Director is superb for creating serious games (immersive learning simulations).
Rick Jones (Adobe Senior Product Marketing Manager for Director and Contribute) also spoke at both of the Director sessions at MAX, and will be running a session called Creating Effective Serious Games with Director and Flash.
Adobe continues to heavily promote Director at various eLearning and game conferences across the country in the past few months. Adobe is definitely keeping busy.
October 9th, 2007
The video from the Director 11 Sneak Peek session has made it out on to the web! I’d heard that our company got mentioned in the session, and lo and behold, it was really in there. We (aka ExploreLearning) were the middle item listed under educational content publishers. A bit small in this picture, but I still feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
The video for this session is rather long (aka large file) so I’m turning it in to a FLV and we’ll see where I can put it up. Those on the Direct-L mailing list probably noticed where the video is currently sitting, and if you really need to see it soon you can go ahead and join the list to see the archives from this week.
October 9th, 2007
For those that watch the Showtime series Weeds, you may have noticed your favorite little icon around the 25 minute mark of the episode that aired last Monday while I was off at Adobe MAX in Chicago.
In this scene the main dope dealing character was stalking a woman (not yet sure why…plot twist is ongoing) who gives mammograms. To start the mammogram the woman double-clicks on the Director icon on a machine running OSX. The icon expands as a program begins, and that is the point that they cut away from the computer screen. Later when they came back to it a data acquisition program was running.
I wonder if the people that create Weeds knew most of us would miss this since we were in Chicago. Hmm… Anyway, I still want to get my thoughts from MAX up here and pictures of the funky new pen in the next few days so stay tuned (a cold is dragging me down a bit right now).
Picture snapped with my Cybershot…looked better in HDTV!
October 8th, 2007
Sorry for not getting anything up more quickly. Work continues to suck away my fun time…
A nice summary of the Sneak Peek session was written up. I didn’t make it there, but did make it to the BOF session. I’ll post a bit more about that this weekend. I also believe someone videotaped the Sneak Peek and hopefully will find that on YouTube somewhere.
Also..just noticed that comments on this site haven’t been working for the past n (or maybe n+1) months. Oh well 🙂
October 4th, 2007