Solving technology problems, one at a time
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 readingMy Linpus Acer Aspire One was laying idle for a few months, then I pulled it out to use it, and was dismayed when it would not charge. The orange battery charging light would flash for a second, then turn off.
Problem 1: The Acer would not power up with the AC adapter.
After scanning the web for a while, it appeared there were several possible reasons for this:
The easiest possibility to deal with was to assume that the AC adapter cable had gone bad so I ordered a new one. Fortunately they are inexpensive. I found one through Buy.com for a total of $19.84 including the shipping and handling.
Continue readingA few months ago, we installed Red5 0.7.0 on a Windows server to stream Flash video inside the firewall. This server is used mainly to stream short clips that are embedded in learning modules.
The JW FLV player v. 4.6 is included in the learning module template and enables us to display the videos with a high degree of flexibility.
Example of a player that contains multiple short video clips.
The player generates a navigation listing on the right from the XML playlist.
One 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
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If you have ever opened a VOB file from a DVD in Quicktime, you’ve probably noticed that there is no sound. When you examine the properties of the file, you’ll see that it is an
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.
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