How to capture a scrolled window in Snagit

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The scrolled window setting is a feature in Snagit that can be used to capture a page or application whose contents are too long or too wide to fit in one window. There is an “auto-scroll” setting which is supposed to scroll the window vertically or horizontally until all the content is captured.

I’ve never been able to get that to work and assumed it was broken on Windows XP. Perhaps it works on Vista. After playing with all the options I did finally manage to find a good workaround, although I still can’t get the default “auto-scroll” setting to work.

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AS3: TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.display::SimpleButton

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If you get an error like this in an actionscript 3 Flash file: TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.display::SimpleButton@61422481 to [symbolname]. at flash.display::Sprite/constructChildren() at flash.display::Sprite() at flash.display::MovieClip() at classname()[/path_to/as/classname.as:34] Check the symbol

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How to tell which Amazon items interest your visitors

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One of the things that I always wondered about Amazon Associates reports was that it the reports display what has been ordered but not the items that were clicked on but not ordered.

Recently I stumbled on that information by accident, so here it is:

Go to your Amazon Associates Orders Report.

Picture 43.jpeg

Select a date range and scroll down to the report. Items with orders will be shown. But Items with no orders will be hidden, and if there were no orders during the period you select, there will be a very final-looking and misleading message “There was no activity in this period”.

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Import long narration files into Presenter

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Adobe Presenter is an add-on to Powerpoint that produces Articulate-like Flash presentations from your Powerpoint slides. At around $500.00 list price it’s out of reach for a lot of content developers, but with an academic discount the price drops considerably, to about $150, and it starts to be a viable option for SME’s to purchase for Rapid Elearning development.

But even with the lower price, it may not be convenient for everyone involved in producing a course to have Presenter installed, so it is useful to know how to import and sync narration created outside Presenter. This way, a narrator can take their own laptop and a USB microphone off into a completely quiet room, which often makes more difference in the quality of the audio than almost anything else.

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CVS error: server reported an error while performing the “cvs add” command. common: cvs server: [filename] added independently by second party.

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When trying to replace some old files in my local workspace, then commit the new ones to CVS, I got this error:

    The server reported an error while performing the “cvs commit” command. myproject: cvs server: failed to create lock directory for `/cvsrepositories/path_to/myproject’ (/cvsrepositories/path_to/myproject/subfolder/#cvs.lock): No such file or directory common: cvs server: lock failed – giving up myproject: cvs [server aborted]: lock failed – giving up – did not match any documents.

It turned out that the files had been previously stored in another CVS repository, with a different directory structure. Some of the directories still had CVS folders with pointers to the old repository directories and hostname.

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An Actionscript 3 Drag and Drop Medical Treasure Hunt Game

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This game is a framework to create a simulation of a crash cart in a hospital. A crash cart is a red metal tool cart with 6 drawers, filled with the items used by the Cardiac Arrest team to save people’s lives when they have a cardiac arrest. Speed is of the essence in an arrest, so the people on the team need to know exactly where each item is in the drawers. The goal of this game is to help train team members to find the items they need.

VIEW DEMO

An item to be found is randomly chosen, and the player clicks on a drawer and looks through the items to find the one they are looking for. When it is found, they drag the item to the target (which will probably be animated and a whole lot cooler looking in the final game. If they get it right, they get positive feedback of some sort and another item is chosen. If not, the item pops back to its last position before the drag and they get another chance to find the correct item.

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