Month: January 2008

How to analyze Captivate Movie structure

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If you want to create widgets that control Captivate files with new functions, other than the standard playbar functions, you will need to develop them in flash. Here’s how to figure out what is going on in a Captivate movie file:

Create a Captivate movie, and publish it (Captivate 2) or export it to Flash (Captivate 3). To create my faster-slower widgets, I had to decompile it into an .fla (I used SWFdecompiler )

Open it in Flash, and start exploring the structure. If you are using version 3, by far the best tool you can use include the “debug movie” command.

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Review of the latest iPhone Update (1.1.3)

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A few days ago, Apple sent down version 1.1.3 of the IPhone software. This update is a huge leap in much-needed functionality.

Home Page
The home page interface now makes sense! It always looked as if it were customizable, and practically begged you to add items to it, but it wasn’t possible. Now it is.

Adding a new application is as simple as browsing to the application on iPhone Safari, clicking the “+” symbol and selecting “add to home page.” The various web-based iphone applications available all over the internet are now as easy to access from the iphone home page as the native apps.

And all the icons on the home page can be moved around, reorganized, and shifted to other pages (up to 7 of them.) Even the dock icons (Phone, Mail, Safari, iPod) can be moved.

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Use Subtitle Workshop to generate captions for Rich-MediaProject

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Over the last couple of years, Microsoft Producer has become less and less of a viable option for synching powerpoint and video. Probably because of browser changes, it works on less browsers than before, and is no longer compatible even with Powerpoint 2007. So I went in search of a Flash-based replacement for MS Producer. I’ve found it in the Rich-Media-Project’s Rich-Media Pack I.

RMP I features 4 components: A Flash-Paper “player”, an FLV video player, a slide list and a media playlist. You create a flash-paper version of the powerpoint or word document, then synch it to the video with XML. The playlist is generated by another xml file, and the captions are created using a third XML file.
The only thing missing is an easy way to create the XML files, so I am creating templates for the captions and slide list XML files in Subtitle workshop. Below is the code for the Custom Format file for the captions:

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Recent research on Alzheimer’s Disease: Inflammation, and the role of viral and bacterial infection

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The last year saw some very exciting developments in Alzheimer’s research. Among them, the relationship of inflamation processes to cognitive decline and a possible relationship of the herpes simplex virus in the presence of a certain genotype to the development of Alzheimers.

Simon Cooke, who writes a blog called the "Accidental Scientist," has posted a very readable and informative summary of some of the most interesting highlights of the latest research. He does a great job of explaining the new discoveries, and speculates about links between infectious diseases and chronic diseases yet to be confirmed. In particular his post on the use of an anti-inflammatory drug to treat Alzheimers – in minutes!, and his post on the possible role of Herpes in many chronic diseases are particularly worth reading.

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