Recently in Adobe Category

Last year, I recorded a Captivate 5 course for lynda.com. Over this summer, we recorded some additional content to add features from Captivate 5.5. That new content is now available.

Some of the new features that we cover include:
  • Free rotations
  • Shadows
  • Gradients
  • Exporting to iOS and YouTube
If you are an existing lynda.com subscriber, then the new content will automatically appear in your online library in the Captivate 5 course.
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Recently, I recorded a series on Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite for Lynda.com!

with: James Lockman

Course Description:
Up and Running with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite shows designers how to create interactive publications for tablet devices using Adobe InDesign and the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Introducing this emerging publishing platform, author James Lockman discusses the DPS workflow, comparing it with existing EPUB and print workflows, and highlights key layout and design considerations when designing for DPS. The course explains how to incorporate hyperlinks, slideshows, panoramas, audio and video, and pan and zoom capabilities as a means of adding value to a publication. Lastly, the course sheds light on compiling interactive folios and testing and publishing finished projects. Exercise files accompany the course.

Topics Include:
    • Determining your digital publishing market
    • Designing for an interactive publication
    • Creating buttons
    • Setting up image sequences
    • Building the panorama viewer
    • Configuring audio and setting video playback options
    • Creating a web viewer portal
    • Structuring articles into folios using the Folio Builder
    • Testing a folio locally 
    • Publishing folios
    • Building viewers for iPad and Android

Duration:
2.68 Hours

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RIM, the makers of the BlackBerry Playbook, set up shop today on the corner of 34th and Broadway. Their bus and sidewalk tables allow the curious to kick the tires, so to speak, on their tablet computer. I can say that the device is a delight to hold and use. Its operating system is a leap forward for mobile computing, with additional gestures and true multitasking. Its video capture and playback is stunning, too. 

My son, Arthur, and I each developed apps for PlayBook under a developer challenge that RIM issued last fall. Now that the SDK is up to speed and Flash Builder 5.5 is out, apps are being made fast and furious. I am working on a blog entry on my Adobe Blog about using Flash CS5.5 and Flash Builder 5.5 to build one app and deploy it painlessly to iPhone, iPad, PlayBook, and Android. I am amazed at how easy it is to get the project done now.
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I came across this article in the Register about Flash's present and future on desktop and Mobile. 

The title is the provocative: Adobe Flash: 20m phones flip Steve Jobs the bird and it refers to the meteoric rise of Android phones. 

I am most intrigued by the claim that Steve Jobs' personal vendetta against Flash is the best thing to happen to Flash since, well, Flash. Jobs' claims of instability and of the player not being ready for mobile spurred Adobe in to high gear, and Flash Player 10.1 and 10.2 are the result.

The article also mentions that although Flash Player is forbidden on iOS devices, Adobe's AIR is allowed after a brief period where it was walled out by the terms of the Developer Agreement.

Since AIR is running on a plethora of Android and other devices as well as iOS, it seems that AIR is a smart choice for companies wishing to develop cross-platform applications quickly and with a minimum of recoding.

Add to this Adobe's next releases Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder (in public beta at Adobe Labs), which cater to multi-screen development, and you've got a complete app development environment for just about all screens. 
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Adobe has adopted a quarterly update schedule for Acrobat. The second Tuesday of the last month of Adobe's quarters will be update Tuesdays, and Adobe hit this one right on schedule. Acrobat 8,9 and X all got updates today.

System administrators appreciate schedules. They also appreciate software that updates on a schedule. Adobe is offering these quarterly updates via the desktop update mechanism as well as through a SCUP catalog for system administrators. This allows sysadmins to better manage the deployment of updates to Acrobat.

You can read more about today's updates here.
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Back at Adobe MAX 2010, RIM announced a plan to encourage development of applications for their forthcoming PlayBook tablet. They promised a PlayBook for anyone who put a PlayBook app into their AppWorld prior to the release date of the tablet. I've blogged about the PlayBook previously, and I feel that it represents a significant step forward toward making a tablet a user's primary computer.

My son Arthur, who blogs about technology and creates YouTube training videos, took the challenge seriously. He dug into the public betas of Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst, got the PlayBook SKD, and went to town.

He developed in Flash Builder, which has several advantages to using the native language. Adobe includes many output paths from Flash Builder, including AIR Desktop, AIR for Android and (with the PlayBook SDK) PlayBook. It is also possible to package for iPhone, but it's a command line task as of yet. I do expect to see Flash Professional-like packaging in Flash Builder before too long, though. Having one development environment makes app creation, testing and deployment so much faster.

Along the way, he encountered one major hurdle in the development process: there's no device on which to test the app! While RIM offers a VMWare simulator, it lacks some key features like multi-touch screen interactions, accelerometer behaviors, geolocation, and more. While these features are accessible in apps, they are hard to simulate on a laptop.

Regardless, he got an app working and submitted to the store. The app is a browser for our CommuniPix service. He plans to expand it to be a more functional interface to the service, including camera access, in-ap ordering, and more. I look forward to seeing what he cooks up after he gets his hands on a device. Now, to get busy on my app...
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Adobe Captivate Icon

Image via Wikipedia

I spent a week out in California back in November working on a Captivate 5 essentials training course with Lynda.com. It's now available, and here's the description and link. Please share with your friends in education and HR who might be making online training materials and presentations.

Captivate 5 Essential Training
with: James Lockman

...is now live in the OTL:

Course Description:
In Captivate 5 Essential Training, author James Lockman demonstrates the core features of Captivate 5, the popular tool for authoring e-learning content such as interactive presentations, click-through simulations, and customized assessments. He shows how to import and sync PowerPoint presentations, add interactivity, and incorporate audio, video, and voiceovers. The course also includes tutorials on assessment reporting and integrating with SCORM-compliant learning management systems. Exercise files accompany the course.

Topics Include:
Touring the interface and workspaces
Building a basic project with shapes, objects, and text
Branding a presentation using master slides and object styles
Exploring user-based content at Captivate Exchange
Animating with the Timeline
Adding buttons, rollover images, and captions 
Creating branching presentations
Working with templates
Recording a simulation
Creating assessments with customized questions
Setting up quiz reporting on acrobat.com
Exporting and sharing a project

Duration:
7.25 Hours

Click here to view the intro movie on YouTube:
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For the first time in my life, I'm working for a "big" company. This particular "big" company is Adobe Systems, Inc. I must say that I am so far enjoying the challenge of learning big company processes. Coming from a small print shop and then from a one-man shop, it's somewhat overwhelming to have to think of every word or action in terms of how someone else may interpret it. I'll settle in soon enough, though.Times-Square.jpg

One thing that I'm learning is that I haven't found a bad apple yet. I know that there are over 8,000 people working here, and I've yet to meet them all, but these last few weeks have been a steady parade of one pleasant, helpful and sincere person after another. Being a person who thrives on personal interaction, I am very excited to have joined Adobe.

My office is in Times Square, which is pretty cool in and of itself. I must look like an office worker, because I don't get accosted by the tour guide hawkers on the street every day.

I'll report here from time to time on my life in the big company and in the city.
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Users of Adobe Captivate 5 can use acrobat.com or their own server to host reviews of their Captivate projects. This process is called a Shared Review and involves starting a review from an open project in Captivate, adding some reviewers, and then publishing the review document to acrobat.com. Reviewers download a .crev file and open it with Adobe Captivate Reviewer 2.0. The reviewer adds comments with the Reviewer Application and publishes them to the comment repository. Comments appear in the Comments panel directly on the timeline in Captivate 5.

On the Macintosh, this process fails because the AIR security model prevents the Reviewer application from copying files into its internal file cache. The problem manifests with the following messages:

"User does not have required privileges. Ensure that the user is part of the application owner group."
or
"The SWF file could not be loaded"

In order to enable the application to function correctly, you need to change permissions some folders and add yourself to the group of which the Captivate Reviewer is a member.

Based on the name in the screen shots in this tech note, it's Sanoj Kumar who deserves the credit for arriving at a solution to this issue.

The solution involves some work in the Terminal, but it misses an important point. 

In order to execute the step entitled "Assign write permission to owners and groups", you need to enable the root user. In addition, you need to add the "sudo" command before the following steps in this section:

sudo chmod -R o+w Adobe\ Captivate\ Reviewer\ 2.0.app
and
sudo chmod -R g+w Adobe\ Captivate\ Reviewer\ 2.0.app

You can disable the root user when you're done with updating permissions. Thanks, Sanoj, for posting this fix. This had been a very confusing error for a lot of people.
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At Adobe MAX last month, I saw several demos of the upcoming Blackberry PlayBook. The PlayBook is RIM's entry into the tablet marketplace, which has seen tremendous success of Apple's iPad and Samsung's Galaxy.

The PlayBook has several things that set it apart from the others, however. The most obvious is its BlackBerry heritage, a feature that makes it immediately appealing to enterprise customers. The PlayBook is much more than a tablet that has a BlackBerry logo on it, however.

Technically, it's a screamer with a 1 GHz dual core processor and 1GB of RAM. Its 1024 x 600 touchscreen responds to at least 4 simultaneous touches, and perhaps more. In addition, its BlackBerry Tablet OS supports both Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR Mobile in addition to Java and other technologies.

I am interested in developing applications using AIR for Mobile, since I've had some experience with AIR for desktop and TV. Fortunately for me, RIM has made it easy to get connected to their developer tools.


In addition, they have a webinar series that puts developers in touch with smart folks who want to help expand the PlayBook developer network.


As an enticement to get people to write and publish PlayBook apps, RIM is offering free PlayBooks to developers who get an app into their AppWorld.


This is great for RIM and for developers, since it gives them the tools they need to build apps for the PlayBook. Also, since it will run AIR apps, I can write an AIR Mobile app that will play on PlayBook as well as Android devices and televisions. I believe that PlayBook and AIR Mobile will be a golden opportunity for developers of entertainment and enterprise apps alike.

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