Category: Applications

Changing the window scope in Firebug

Posted on November 15, 2008 by ellen

If I had to choose one piece of advice for new web developers, I’d tell them to learn to use Firebug. Firebug is probably the most valuable debugging tool available, but if you are just getting started, it may seem pretty opaque at first.

In addition, some things do not appear to work as advertised. In particular, the “cd” function does nothing as far as I can tell.

The page that documents the commands you can use within Firebug lists the cd command as a way of changing the window scope:

iTunes garbles playback on all songs

Posted on November 5, 2008 by ellen

I’ve been having a lot of authorization issues with iTunes since a recent upgrade, so when this morning, iTunes started garbling playback on ALL my music, I panicked thinking it was another bug. It sounded

No audio in Flash 9 in Windows XP

Posted on October 29, 2008 by ellen

I’ve come across several PC’s that will play Flash videos, but with no audio. There appear to be a couple of possible fixes to try, thanks to Selder and others in the Weyland.be blog. Go

Display invisible files in the finder – Leopard

Posted on October 25, 2008 by ellen

If you are trying to edit .htaccess files or other invisible files through the GUI, or using Fetch’s automatic linkage with BBedit, you will need to show hidden files. Open the terminal and type: defaults

No sound on Flash player 9 on some PC’s

Posted on October 13, 2008 by ellen

We had a problem with some people not being able to hear the sound on Flash videos, even after adjusting all their volume controls carefully. It turns out that sometimes the correct settings don’t get

No bootable device –insert boot disk and press any key error on Intel iMac

Posted on October 12, 2008 by ellen

I came back from a trip, turned on my iMac, only to see a black screen with a DOS-like prompt: “No bootable device — insert boot disk and press any key.” It did not seem

Creating simple animations in Powerpoint 2002

Posted on August 30, 2008 by ellen

How can you make a shape or image move across the screen? Follow these steps to create your first motion-path animation in Powerpoint. PC-version required, unfortunately.

A workaround for the lack of trigger animations in Keynote

Posted on August 17, 2008 by ellen

One Powerpoint feature that Keynote does not yet have is animation triggers. In Powerpoint, you can set an animation to be triggered when a particular object elsewhere on the slide is clicked. This can be used to create interactivity for web-based elearning, or perhaps for presentations where there is some interaction from the audience and the exact sequence of clicks is not figured out in advance.

A workaround to create a trigger effect is to make the triggers into hyperlinks that link to slides that look identical to the slide containing the trigger, but which contain the response animation. For each trigger, there will be a corresponding animation slide. The animations are set to begin “after transition” or in other words, right after the slide loads.

GooberGuide to Adobe Captivate

Posted on July 25, 2008 by ellen

I got a chance to take a look at a new Captivate eBook the other day, “GooberGuides – Captivate Tips & Tricks,” and I really wish I’d had this months ago. Captivate Tips and Tricks is a compendium of all the time-saving answers the other books never tell you. For example the tip on how to use wildcard text in text entry boxes would have been well worth the modest price of the ebook when I ran into that problem on a recent project.

The chapter on preventing project corruption is brief but extremely useful. If you’ve worked with Captivate for a while, you’ve probably corrupted a project. The tips in this chapter should be on the opening splash screen when you first launch Captivate.

When Dave loses its settings

Posted on June 17, 2008 by ellen

At work I use DAVE by Thursby Software to improve my Mac’s compatibility with the Windows network. Without it, I can connect to the network, but things are never quite right, and Dave just seems