Flame Painter: Exploring small setting changes with big effects

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This series of examples will give you an idea of the way very small changes in Flame Painter’s settings can produce very different effects. 

The starting point for the series was the color selection: a gradient of gold, aqua, red and violet, ending in dark blue. The last session’s brush settings were still there, so I began at that point: a  fairly long (Size=235) Ribbon brush with multiple nested orbits. The looping lasso-like edge of the brush has been circled: you can see the brush tail looping off to the left and then trailing off all the way up to the top of the image. The rather chaotic image is caused because of the whipping action of the brush: there are multiple rotations going on within it, creating unpredictable results.

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Exploring Flame Painter’s Ribbon brush – Part 2

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In Part 1, I demonstrated some Ribbon Brush settings. This section contains a second set of Ribbon brush examples.
Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovi? available on http://www.escapemotions.com/.

There are three brush types in Flame Painter: Flame, Follow and Ribbon. Each produces an amazing variety of results depending on the settings chosen.

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A SCORM-Ready Template: Part 5A. Captivate Quizzes – Introduction

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Although Captivate has its own SCORM interface, its reliability in our LMS over the last few years has become increasingly problematic. Data gets lost, quizzes score incorrectly, or do not complete at all, and there is a lot of frustration. 

At the same time, there has been increasing demand from subject matter experts and educators for inexpensive, easy to learn tools like Captivate that leverage their Powerpoint skills but have plenty of flexibility and options for interactivity. So something had to be done to make Captivate useful again.

What I decided to do was to turn over all the SCORM communication for Captivate activities to our HTML template, which doesn’t have the communication issues of the Adobe products. Using the SCORM template as a wrapper does not add a lot of work to a project, in fact, it requires only one line of code to add a scored Captivate or Presenter quiz to a template-based learning module.

Any type of scored Captivate file will work – both question slides and interactive slides. The module can handle one or more Captivate quizzes, either by themselves, or in combination with other types of content and quizzes, such as Questionmark Perception or the template-based interaction quizlets.

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Phone recording with the iPhone – and other devices

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I’ve been doing a series of phone interviews lately, and I find it difficult to take notes while I talk, so I needed a reliable way to record these conversations (after getting all parties’ permission, of course!). An added complication is that the interviews usually involve multiple participants, so we typically use a conference line to connect – either DimDim or something similar.

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