Solving technology problems, one at a time
After upgrading to SnowLeopard a new bug in Mail.app has appeared. About once a week, one or more emails will decide to reproduce themselves hundreds of times in a folder called “Recovered Messages”. If that email has a large attachment, it can quickly fill up the limited space allotted to my email account.
Continue readingI’ve been experimenting with enhancing some of my photos in Photoshop to create more interesting images. I use a Canon PowerShot SD 990IS point-and-shoot camera that does a good job on the whole, but because the lens isn’t very high quality, images sometimes come out somewhat hazy. The camera actually captures a lot of detail but it takes some processing to bring it out. I’m not against using some tricks to emphasize what’s good about the picture, even to the point where it crosses the line into illustration.
For this project, I started with a fairly unexciting picture of my dining room. Its one strong point was the sunlight streaming in the windows which brought out the colors in the wood chair and tablecloth. This picture was one of several shots of the same scene with different exposure settings.
This was the lightest one, chosen for the detail visible through the windows. However in choosing the lightest exposure, the tablecloth lost a lot of its color. However I thought it had potential.
Original image
In the last year or so, I got used to being able to export to just about any format from Quicktime Pro using Quicktime Conversions. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I installed Flip4Mac’s Snow
Continue readingRecently I’ve been using the Photoshop Filter Gallery filters more than usual, and experienced a few apparent problems, particularly with the grayscale filters. First all the grayscale filters suddenly seemed to stop working. All of them showed nothing but a completely blank screen, no matter what settings were tried.
I really thought this was some sort of bug with CS4. But a search of the Adobe forums turned up nothing. Clearing the plugin cache and Filter Gallery preferences reverted the filters to their defaults, and fixed the problem.
Continue readingOne of our content experts wanted to use Powerpoint to create an interactive presentation. Although Captivate would probably be the ideal choice, she only owns Adobe Presenter, so I suggested she use that to convert the Powerpoint for the web.
The problem is that Presenter, by default, shows a navbar on the side and a playbar below the presentation. In this case, allowing linear movement would break the logical flow of the interactive module. This project is more of a decision-support tool, and less a linear learning module where the user must view every page. To make a module like this function correctly using Adobe Presenter, follow these steps:
On upgrading to Snow Leopard, a little window with a progress bar started appearing: “Flip4Mac importing”. No reference to what was being imported or why. This has apparently been fixed in Flip4Mac WMV 2.3.0.11-Beta. It’s
Continue readingIf your Mac refuses to go into Firewire mode, check your keyboard! Chances are, it is plugged into your monitor. Plug it directly into the computer (you’ll probably have to dig out your old USB
Continue readingThe other day, I found an Internet Explorer ordered-list bug I hadn’t seen before:
A numbered list of items which looks right in other browsers will be rendered with the number “1” in front of every item in IE7.
This happens when a width is added to the “LI” tags in an ordered list. Internet Explorer 7 will not increment the numbers.
An instructional designer came to me with a Captivate issue the other day. She had converted a working version 3 Captivate file to version 4. The converted file no longer calculated scores properly. There was a walk-through tutorial showing how to use a new web application, then a short multiple-choice quiz with 5 questions. The setting “Show Progress” was turned on, so each question should show a label: “Question 1 of 5, Question 2 of 5, etc.”
In version 3, everything had worked fine. In version 4, things looked fine in Edit mode, but at runtime, the numbering was off. The first question was numbered “Question 2 of 7” and it would increment from there.
I immediately assumed it was counting clickboxes from somewhere else in the file, but when I looked at the Advanced Interaction page, Add to Total was grayed out for all buttons and clickboxes, and Track Score was also not checked for any of them. So, I assumed it could not be the clickboxes. Thinking it might be some corruption in the question slides, I re-created all the quiz questions, and yet the problem remained.
Continue readingIf the scratch disk used by Final Cut Pro cuts out in the middle of an export, Final Cut Pro becomes unstable: the next time you try to launch it, it will crash on startup.
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