Quick, to-the-point, video: RSS in Plain English.
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.
Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University has created a great video highlighting the benefits of Web 2.0 and how content is king. This is something that we’ve tried to say in several presentations lately about blogging and RSS. Michael just does it a little more eloquently than us. It’s not a flat web any more.
Have you ever needed to quickly resize an image but didn’t have any photo editing software available on the machine you were using? I’ve had that happen from time to time. That’s where Snipshot comes in very handy. It’s a simple web-based photo editor. You can quickly upload an image (or point to an existing image on a site), and perform a few simple manipulations of that image… all online. It has helped me get out of a few binds.
Snipshot features listed from their site:
- No download necessary—100% browser based, no plug-ins required
- One-click import from any web site (including Flickr) with our bookmarklet
- Export to Flickr, or save as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG or TIF
- One-click enhance improves most images
- Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize
- Basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
- Unlimited undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or ⌘Z and ⌘Y on your Mac)
- Nondestructive editing—we always work from the original
- Edit big pictures—up to 10 MB, or 5000×5000 pixels
- Import PDF (first page only), EPS or SVG
Just wanted to pass along a quick update on our Commons multimedia workstations. We’ve updated all of the video software on our two digital video machines (MM2 & MM3).
MM2 (Mac)
Final Cut Studio 5 update:
MM3 (PC)
Pinnacle Studio 10.5 update
Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0
Adobe Production Studio:
For more information on our Multimedia Workstations, check out the Information Commons computer site.
This post is as much for me (to remember where to find this handy tool) as it is to pass on some info about a cool little app that I can never seem to remember the name of. The cool tool is called NXPowerLite and it does one thing very well… shrink PowerPoint presentations. We get presentations that come through here from time to time that are just enormous! It’s mainly due to people putting really high res images into the slides, which is not necessary since a monitor/projector is only capable of displaying around 72-100dpi anyway. Just run the overgrown ppt file through this handy little piece of software and it brings the presentation down to a more manageable size. I just ran a 150mb file through it yesterday and it took it down to 8mb without any noticable difference on the screen.
From time to time I run across interesting open source pieces of software relevant to multimedia and projects we’ve worked on in the Commons. I just ran across an open source piece of software for creating DVD’s called DVDStyler. It’s definitely not as powerful as DVD Studio, or some of the other closed source ($$) alternative that we use for large project, but if you just want to put together a DVD menu and layout, this little app will do it… and the price is right too (free). Like many open source projects it could use a little polish, but from my trials, it does what it says it can do. So, if you’re looking for a quick free way to put together a DVD, give DVDStyler a try.
Many times when I’m putting together a new site design, I like to surf around the web for inspiration. I thought I’d share my current list of (mainly CSS) design collection sites.
These sites have a lot of nice eye candy that will usually get my creative juices flowing.
The iLecture project is alive and kicking, if only as an alpha project right now. As a quick refresher, iLecture is a program that can take Powerpoint presentations, associate audio with each slide, and create a deployable movie. The original iLecture, written in Visual Basic 6.0, was created as a proof of concept, and never designed for deployment to a broad audience. iLecture, with the working name iLectureJ, is being totally redesigned in Java (hence the J). This should open up the program to both Windows and Mac users.
Since we’re departing from a Visual Studio framework, a number of addons have to be encorperated for our solution to read and translate powerpoint files. First is the PowerML core, which translates a Powerpoint file into an XML file. XML is a standard that’s controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), so it’s a technology that will be around for a while. Furthermore, the new Microsoft Office suite will begin using the XML standard to store all files.
Since we no longer have access to the Visual Studio classes that made it easy to create images from powerpoint slides, a new solution was needed. For this, we turned to another WC3 standard: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). These are images that are created using markup code (similar to html), and are therefore zoomable with no loss of image quality. The space required to store such an image is much smaller when compared with a raster version, since SVGs are comprised of markup code. SVGs are beginning to make a mark in cyberspace, with IE and Firefox adopting rendering tools to view these types of images on the web.
In order to take our XML and turn into SVG slides, a few solutions were pulled from the Apache Software Foundation’s library. This foundation provides a number of open source software solutions that cover nearly any aspect of software engineering. For our project, we made use of XMLBeans, a framework that created Java classes that made coding and translating the XML Powerpoint files much easier. From this, Apache’s SVG creation tool, Batik, was used.
Since we are aiming to create a cross platform solution, a cross platform audio solution is essential. For this, we turned to Quicktime, which has a neatly developed Java library for recording and playback. As in the original iLecture, the output of iLectureJ will be a SMIL file. This is another W3C project that uses sound and visuals inside a markup file to deploy movies and sound easily on the internet. Another possibility of SMIL may allow us to deploy these movies onto the movie capable iPods and other multimedia players.
So when will iLectureJ be available? The project is still in the early stages of alpha development, and is only capable of simple Powerpoint conversions. A few testers have gotten to look at it, and will be collaberating with the design team shortly. So an offical release may be a ways off, but a public beta may be in the forseable future. News will be posted here as development goes, so be sure to check back.
For more information about iLecture, visit the project website.
We just completed updating a good portion of the computer hardware in the Information Commons. This includes new general lab machines and a couple new suped-up Multimedia stations which now both include DVD burners. We’ve also purchased a new VHS-DVD burner deck. We noticed a lot of patrons wanting to easily go from VHS tapes to DVD’s. This new deck, the Panasonic DMR-ES35V, makes that task a lot easier.
I just noticed that I seem to post a lot of CSS tools to this site. I guess that’s because they’re the things I use on a daily basis. And (at least at the moment) when I run into a CSS problem, that’s what makes me pull my hair out.
I’ve got another dandy tool to pass on. It’s called CSSVista. This nice little free piece of software works very similar to the “edit css” option in the Firefox Developer Toolbar extension… only it’ll work with IE rendering, which is usually my biggest headache when trying to code CSS. CSSVista pulls up the CSS of your site in the sidebar and shows you in both IE and Firefox the CSS changes on the fly. I can’t tell you how many times this has helped me find some weird IE CSS bug and get it fixed.
