Monday, December 21, 2015
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Educomm 2008 Day One
David Pogue, the New York Times personal technology columnist, had an interesting and entertaining keynote address this morning about Web2.0. You'll be able to view the video of his keynote next week on the www.EduCommconference.com web site. My favorite part was the two songs he ended the program with. David went out on a limb saying he didn't think video on cells phones would take off. I bet a bunch of cell phone companies didn't want to hear that. With beta cell phones starting to have mini projectors in them I think they may be viable. I venture to say that many internet tv stations will pick up viewership because of the program
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Doing the will of God
Nothing makes us more uncertain and unsecure that not being sure we are in the will of God. And nothing is more encouraging than knowing for sure that we are. Then, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what happens, we can stand fast.
We can be out of a job (yep), but know that we are in the will of God. We can face a threatening situation but know that we are in the will of God. We can have the odds stacked against us but know we are in the will of God. Nothing intimidates those who know that what they believe is based on what God has said.
The one who does the will of God lives forever. 1 John 2:17
We can be out of a job (yep), but know that we are in the will of God. We can face a threatening situation but know that we are in the will of God. We can have the odds stacked against us but know we are in the will of God. Nothing intimidates those who know that what they believe is based on what God has said.
The one who does the will of God lives forever. 1 John 2:17
Monday, March 31, 2008
Very Important Meeting April1 at KETC (No Joke)
Missouri Motion Media Association (MOMMA) has rescheduled it's meeting! After cancelling the much anticipated March 4 reception due to the huge snow in St. Louis, MOMMA is pleased to announce that they are back on track and look forward to seeing you!
The Board of Directors of the Missouri Motion Media Association invites you to a membership preview reception at the studios of KETC Television, in St. Louis on April 1, 2008 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. KETC Studios are located at 3655 Olive Street.
Network with film and digital media industry professionals, share your brochures, business cards, ideas, and news. Learn more about how the Missouri Motion Media Association (MOMMA) can serve your personal career growth and goals.
Complimentary hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served along with some great conversation and information about how this new association is changing the landscape of Missouri's film industry.
Can't make the meeting? Then go to MOMMA's web site: www.mommaonline.com.
The Board of Directors of the Missouri Motion Media Association invites you to a membership preview reception at the studios of KETC Television, in St. Louis on April 1, 2008 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. KETC Studios are located at 3655 Olive Street.
Network with film and digital media industry professionals, share your brochures, business cards, ideas, and news. Learn more about how the Missouri Motion Media Association (MOMMA) can serve your personal career growth and goals.
Complimentary hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served along with some great conversation and information about how this new association is changing the landscape of Missouri's film industry.
Can't make the meeting? Then go to MOMMA's web site: www.mommaonline.com.
Adobe Photoshop Express vs Picnik
Adobe Photoshop has finally entered into the online photo editing arena with Adobe Photoshop Express. I’ve waited rather impatiently for this one, since Adobe has always been the image editing king. I obviously had rather high hopes for it. That being said, I’ve been pretty darn impressed with Picnik.com, and it has been a mainstay in my Top Ten Web 2.0 presentations. So, instead of simply reviewing the new kid on the block, I figure we ought to see how it stands up to the current king of the hill.
Categories for the throwdown are going to be: Image In, Basic Editing, Filters/Fun Stuff, Image Out, Bonus Features, and User Experience.
Image In Photoshop: In order to begin using Photoshop, you need to create an Adobe account. Plug in the information, and then wait for the confirmation email. Unfortunately, you can’t start using Express until you get your account confirmed and for some reason, my confirmation email took over 2 hours to arrive. Once you’re in, you can bring in photos in one of 4 ways: By uploading them from your computer, by importing them in from y our photo albums (assuming you’ve already uploaded them), by choosing photos from the general community, or by importing them from other sites. The other sites options are pretty limited right now, just Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. I would seriously hope that those options increase in the future. No Flickr? That’s just crazy. When you upload a new photo, you can choose to keep things organized by putting it into an album, which is a nice idea if you’re going to be using this often. Then you just double click to begin editing.
Picnik: Right from the splash page, you can upload a photo. No need to register at all, but you are certainly welcome to. Bonus points for that, particularly in a school environment. Besides uploading, you can also grab a photo by providing a URL to it, doing a Yahoo search for one, using your Webcam to snap a picture, or by importing one from MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket or Webshots.
Winner - Picnik due to the ease of getting started and variety of ways to bring in pics.
Basic Editing Photoshop: You have the usual suite of tools, red eye correction, crop and resize, , white balance, and saturation. But then you also have a few more unusual ones like Touchup, Fill Light and Highlight. When you select a tool, tools are very easy to use, most providing you with a series of preview thumbnails that you just mouseover. When you do, the actual image you’re working on changes to reflect what it would look like if you applied it. Just click the checkmark if you like it and want to keep it. Photoshop zooms your photo in and out dynamically based on the tool you’re using, so you always have the maximum possible screen space. Also, it gives you a navigation window to move around in. There are multiple levels of undo, and you get a nice visual timeline to go back multiple levels. Most of the tools are pretty self-explanatory, but that retouch tool still has me stumped. Sort of like a poor mans clone stamp, that I can’t get to do anything productive.
Picnik: Once again, all the basics are there. Autofix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color, sharpen and red eye correction. With most of the tools, you can either use sliders or specify your changes numerically. Every tool has onscreen tips to go along with it, and is pretty darn self-explanatory. A zoom slider is always in the lower right, and then you just click and drag to navigate around the image. However, if you’re using a tool that uses click and drag (like crop or rotate), there doesn’t seem to be any way to navigate around the image. Just gotta zoom out all the way. Bonus points under red eye for having two settings to choose from, Human and Furball .
Winner - Photoshop, for having more options to choose from and a really slick live preview interface. Close call.
Filters/Fun Stuff Photoshop: Considering that Photoshop is the king of filters, I’m a little disappointed in the choices here. You have Pop Color, Hue, Black and White, Tint, Sketch and Distort. Black and White does exactly what you’d think, sketch turns your photo into a drawing of sorts. Hue and tint just mess with the colors in a pretty basic way. Pop color also messes with your colors, but in a very targeted way. In my image of the Sphinx beneath a blue sky, I could easily recolor just the sphinx or just the sky. Very Warhol-like. I’m surprised at how accurate it was in its changes. The last filter is Distort, which allows you to pinch, stretch, and twirl the image, distorting it to your heart’s content.
Picnik: Many of Picnik’s filters and fun features used to be available only to premium subscribers. They’ve changed their revenue model to be ad supported for the free version, and put all of the fun stuff back in! Consequently, you have a TON of filters to choose from, including sketches, neon outlines, blurs, mattes, frames, color changes and so on. I’m not kidding, there are a slew of them in there. And you have full control over each of them, to make them mild or max them out. In addition to that, you can add text to images, stamp on shapes or clip art, whiten teeth, blur out ‘blemishes’, or add frames to your photo. At the premium level, they’ve recently added the ability to adjust the levels and curves of your image, exactly the same way you could in Photoshop (the offline version).
Winner - Picnik, in a landslide.
Image Out Photoshop: When you’re all done and you click Save, it saves it back to your library. From there, if you click on the image, you can choose to download it, embed it, get the URL, or email it. For both the embed and copy url commands, it just copies them straight to the clip board. You don’t see the code until you paste it. While that’s fine for advanced users, I think so basic users who have a peripheral understanding of how the clipboard, copy and paste works, may have difficulty with that. Email allows you to email the image once you provide a message and address (or you can use one from an addressbook you can populate). Download gave me the option of choosing one of two sizes for my image before I actually saved it to my computer.
Picnik: When you click the Save & Share tab, you get a series of options that includes save to computer, email photo, Flickr slideshow, email to website, print photo, and then the option to export it directly to MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket and Webshots. The options under each of them are what really set Picnik apart tho. Under Save to Computer, you can choose the dimensions for the image (just type in the numbers), what format you want (TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP or PDF) and what quality you want the compression to be if you chose JPG. Under email photo, you can pick from several different image sizes as well, and choose what email address you want the photo to be coming from. Email to website allows you to send the photo to Typepad, Costco, Walmart, Kodak, AOL, or any other site that allows you to import photos via email. And then of course, you could always just print it out.
Winner - Picnik, in another landslide.
User Experience Photoshop: One the whole, it’s fairly easy to use, although I’ve noticed that it seems to be a bit pokey. It takes a really long time to upload, save, or bounce between sections of the site. The ability to store photos in albums is really nice, as is the dedicated space, but when you just want to get in, edit a photo and get out, it really gets in the way. There is one feature in particular that’s absolutely incredible though. As you apply changes to the image you’re editing, a check box appears next to each feature you’ve used. At any time, you can uncheck that box to turn off that effect. Essentially that allows you to undo anything you’ve done, in any order. That’s incredibly slick. Major points for including that. However, some of the features are a little obscure. I had to play a little while before I figured out what they did. Not only that, after about 20 minutes I noticed that some tools had a little wrench in the lower right of the tool bar. Clicking that opened up advanced options I hadn’t seen before. Doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know they’re there! The interface itself has a black background, and to be honest, is pretty dreary. For lack of a better way of describing it, using Photoshop Express feels like work.
Picnik: Picnik has been through several changes, almost all of them improvements. This version has a huge banner ad at the bottom of the page though, which I’m really not thrilled with. Admittedly, they need to figure out a way to make a buck off of this, so I can’t really complain too strongly, the site is still largely free. Picnik loads up quickly, and is very self explanatory. I think teachers of almost any level could just jump right into it and get started. That being said, there are also some pretty powerful features. While curves and levels are at the premium level right now, those are impressive new additions to an already powerful editor. The interface itself really feels like you’re on a picnik. flowers everywhere, bright colors, and in general it just feels friendly and cute. Where Photoshop feels like work, Picnik feels like fun.
Winner: Picnik. It just feels comfortable to use without any real learning curve.
Conclusion: Well, there you have it. While Photoshop may do the dirty work a little bit better, there’s no question that if I have a quick edit to do, I’ll be heading over to Picnik. It has more features, a friendlier interface, feels snappier, and gives me way more options for getting my images in or out of their site. Okay, now all my professional photographer pals will be emailing me!
Categories for the throwdown are going to be: Image In, Basic Editing, Filters/Fun Stuff, Image Out, Bonus Features, and User Experience.
Image In Photoshop: In order to begin using Photoshop, you need to create an Adobe account. Plug in the information, and then wait for the confirmation email. Unfortunately, you can’t start using Express until you get your account confirmed and for some reason, my confirmation email took over 2 hours to arrive. Once you’re in, you can bring in photos in one of 4 ways: By uploading them from your computer, by importing them in from y our photo albums (assuming you’ve already uploaded them), by choosing photos from the general community, or by importing them from other sites. The other sites options are pretty limited right now, just Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. I would seriously hope that those options increase in the future. No Flickr? That’s just crazy. When you upload a new photo, you can choose to keep things organized by putting it into an album, which is a nice idea if you’re going to be using this often. Then you just double click to begin editing.
Picnik: Right from the splash page, you can upload a photo. No need to register at all, but you are certainly welcome to. Bonus points for that, particularly in a school environment. Besides uploading, you can also grab a photo by providing a URL to it, doing a Yahoo search for one, using your Webcam to snap a picture, or by importing one from MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket or Webshots.
Winner - Picnik due to the ease of getting started and variety of ways to bring in pics.
Basic Editing Photoshop: You have the usual suite of tools, red eye correction, crop and resize, , white balance, and saturation. But then you also have a few more unusual ones like Touchup, Fill Light and Highlight. When you select a tool, tools are very easy to use, most providing you with a series of preview thumbnails that you just mouseover. When you do, the actual image you’re working on changes to reflect what it would look like if you applied it. Just click the checkmark if you like it and want to keep it. Photoshop zooms your photo in and out dynamically based on the tool you’re using, so you always have the maximum possible screen space. Also, it gives you a navigation window to move around in. There are multiple levels of undo, and you get a nice visual timeline to go back multiple levels. Most of the tools are pretty self-explanatory, but that retouch tool still has me stumped. Sort of like a poor mans clone stamp, that I can’t get to do anything productive.
Picnik: Once again, all the basics are there. Autofix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color, sharpen and red eye correction. With most of the tools, you can either use sliders or specify your changes numerically. Every tool has onscreen tips to go along with it, and is pretty darn self-explanatory. A zoom slider is always in the lower right, and then you just click and drag to navigate around the image. However, if you’re using a tool that uses click and drag (like crop or rotate), there doesn’t seem to be any way to navigate around the image. Just gotta zoom out all the way. Bonus points under red eye for having two settings to choose from, Human and Furball .
Winner - Photoshop, for having more options to choose from and a really slick live preview interface. Close call.
Filters/Fun Stuff Photoshop: Considering that Photoshop is the king of filters, I’m a little disappointed in the choices here. You have Pop Color, Hue, Black and White, Tint, Sketch and Distort. Black and White does exactly what you’d think, sketch turns your photo into a drawing of sorts. Hue and tint just mess with the colors in a pretty basic way. Pop color also messes with your colors, but in a very targeted way. In my image of the Sphinx beneath a blue sky, I could easily recolor just the sphinx or just the sky. Very Warhol-like. I’m surprised at how accurate it was in its changes. The last filter is Distort, which allows you to pinch, stretch, and twirl the image, distorting it to your heart’s content.
Picnik: Many of Picnik’s filters and fun features used to be available only to premium subscribers. They’ve changed their revenue model to be ad supported for the free version, and put all of the fun stuff back in! Consequently, you have a TON of filters to choose from, including sketches, neon outlines, blurs, mattes, frames, color changes and so on. I’m not kidding, there are a slew of them in there. And you have full control over each of them, to make them mild or max them out. In addition to that, you can add text to images, stamp on shapes or clip art, whiten teeth, blur out ‘blemishes’, or add frames to your photo. At the premium level, they’ve recently added the ability to adjust the levels and curves of your image, exactly the same way you could in Photoshop (the offline version).
Winner - Picnik, in a landslide.
Image Out Photoshop: When you’re all done and you click Save, it saves it back to your library. From there, if you click on the image, you can choose to download it, embed it, get the URL, or email it. For both the embed and copy url commands, it just copies them straight to the clip board. You don’t see the code until you paste it. While that’s fine for advanced users, I think so basic users who have a peripheral understanding of how the clipboard, copy and paste works, may have difficulty with that. Email allows you to email the image once you provide a message and address (or you can use one from an addressbook you can populate). Download gave me the option of choosing one of two sizes for my image before I actually saved it to my computer.
Picnik: When you click the Save & Share tab, you get a series of options that includes save to computer, email photo, Flickr slideshow, email to website, print photo, and then the option to export it directly to MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket and Webshots. The options under each of them are what really set Picnik apart tho. Under Save to Computer, you can choose the dimensions for the image (just type in the numbers), what format you want (TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP or PDF) and what quality you want the compression to be if you chose JPG. Under email photo, you can pick from several different image sizes as well, and choose what email address you want the photo to be coming from. Email to website allows you to send the photo to Typepad, Costco, Walmart, Kodak, AOL, or any other site that allows you to import photos via email. And then of course, you could always just print it out.
Winner - Picnik, in another landslide.
User Experience Photoshop: One the whole, it’s fairly easy to use, although I’ve noticed that it seems to be a bit pokey. It takes a really long time to upload, save, or bounce between sections of the site. The ability to store photos in albums is really nice, as is the dedicated space, but when you just want to get in, edit a photo and get out, it really gets in the way. There is one feature in particular that’s absolutely incredible though. As you apply changes to the image you’re editing, a check box appears next to each feature you’ve used. At any time, you can uncheck that box to turn off that effect. Essentially that allows you to undo anything you’ve done, in any order. That’s incredibly slick. Major points for including that. However, some of the features are a little obscure. I had to play a little while before I figured out what they did. Not only that, after about 20 minutes I noticed that some tools had a little wrench in the lower right of the tool bar. Clicking that opened up advanced options I hadn’t seen before. Doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know they’re there! The interface itself has a black background, and to be honest, is pretty dreary. For lack of a better way of describing it, using Photoshop Express feels like work.
Picnik: Picnik has been through several changes, almost all of them improvements. This version has a huge banner ad at the bottom of the page though, which I’m really not thrilled with. Admittedly, they need to figure out a way to make a buck off of this, so I can’t really complain too strongly, the site is still largely free. Picnik loads up quickly, and is very self explanatory. I think teachers of almost any level could just jump right into it and get started. That being said, there are also some pretty powerful features. While curves and levels are at the premium level right now, those are impressive new additions to an already powerful editor. The interface itself really feels like you’re on a picnik. flowers everywhere, bright colors, and in general it just feels friendly and cute. Where Photoshop feels like work, Picnik feels like fun.
Winner: Picnik. It just feels comfortable to use without any real learning curve.
Conclusion: Well, there you have it. While Photoshop may do the dirty work a little bit better, there’s no question that if I have a quick edit to do, I’ll be heading over to Picnik. It has more features, a friendlier interface, feels snappier, and gives me way more options for getting my images in or out of their site. Okay, now all my professional photographer pals will be emailing me!
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Top Elearning Course Authoring tools
This data shows that the Articulate tools, Adobe Captivate and Dreamweaver and Lectora are near the top for elearning course authoring. While tools such as Toolbook and Authorware are down a bit.
What surprised me is that there wasn't more discussion around this. Is this just common knowledge these days? Do people buy this?
What surprised me is that there wasn't more discussion around this. Is this just common knowledge these days? Do people buy this?
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Motivations new hero Jon Gordon
Okay if you haven't pick it up yet and you like movational resources take at look at Jon Gordon's new book "The Energy Bus".
http://www.jongordon.com/theenergybusbook.html
Sign up for his weekly e-newsletter and listen to his short podcasts that you'll find on his website.
http://www.jongordon.com/theenergybusbook.html
Sign up for his weekly e-newsletter and listen to his short podcasts that you'll find on his website.
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