Managing multimedia production with Director

This advice about managing a multimedia project comes from James Khazar, multimedia producer for Macromedia’s instructional media department. James has worked in multimedia for 14 years, starting before it was called multimedia.

Managing multimedia production

This advice about managing a multimedia project comes from James Khazar, multimedia producer for Macromedia’s instructional media department. James has worked in multimedia for 14 years, starting before it was called multimedia.

Multimedia design and development is a complex, arduous, and harder-than-you-think proposition. Producing multimedia projects with quality, at a reasonable price, and on time calls for thinking things out ahead of time; establishing goals and milestones; and working with teams of brilliantly creative people who work like dogs. It’s not that much different than any other kind of project where you build a one-of-a-kind product.

A healthy multimedia production process is tailored to the type and scale of the individual project, but certain concepts apply no matter what you’re developing. These concepts are: Always plan ahead, keep the client informed, track the implementation against the plan, and test the results.

This article gives you an idea of how I develop a multimedia project. I hope that these ideas make your project go smoothly.

Create a sketch effect with Photoshop

You can use photoshop and make any image look like a sketch. This tutorial will show you how to take an image and apply a sketch effect on it. I will be using the photo below in this tutorial.

Step 1 – Start photoshop and open the Home Simpson photo. To do this, click “File” >> “Open” >> then select the Home Simpson photo.

Step 2 – Duplicate the Layer. In the layers tab, you will see your image named “Background”. You will want to duplicate this layer by clicking “Layer” >> “Duplicate Layer”. Name the new layer “homer_simpson1″. You layers should look like the image below

Step 3 – Desaturate the layer you just created. To do this, click “Image” >> “Adjustments” >> “Desaturate”. The photo should look like the image below.

Step 4 – Duplicate the desaturated layer. To do this, click “Layer” >> “Duplicate Layer”. Name the new layer “homer_simpson2″. You should have a total of three layers and your layers should look like the image below.

Step 5 – Invert the Image. You will now invert the “homer_simpson2″ layer. To do this, click “Image” >> “Adjustments” >> “Invert”. The layer should look like the image below.

Step 6 – Change Blend Mode to “Color Dodge” on the layer. To do this, click “Layer” >> “Layer Style” >> “Blend Options” >> select “Color Dodge” from the Blend Mode drop down.

Step 7 – Apply the Gaussian Blur to the layer. To do this, click “Filter” >> “Blur” >> “Gaussian Blur”. Change the Radius to 9.0 pixels. The image should look the same as the image below. You now have an image that looks like a sketch!!!

What is Object Oriented Programming?

Everyone that wants to program JavaScript should at least try reading the following section. If you have trouble understanding it, don’t worry. The best way to learn JavaScript is from the examples presented in this tutorial. After you have been through the lessons, come back to this page and read it again.

OOP is a programming technique (note: not a language structure – you don’t even need an object-oriented language to program in an object-oriented fashion) designed to simplify complicated programming concepts. In essence, object-oriented programming revolves around the idea of user- and system-defined chunks of data, and controlled means of accessing and modifying those chunks.

Object-oriented programming consists of Objects, Methods and Properties. An object is basically a black box which stores some information. It may have a way for you to read that information and a way for you to write to, or change, that information. It may also have other less obvious ways of interacting with the information.

Some of the information in the object may actually be directly accessible; other information may require you to use a method to access it – perhaps because the way the information is stored internally is of no use to you, or because only certain things can be written into that information space and the object needs to check that you’re not going outside those limits.

The directly accessible bits of information in the object are its properties. The difference between data accessed via properties and data accessed via methods is that with properties, you see exactly what you’re doing to the object; with methods, unless you created the object yourself, you just see the effects of what you’re doing.

Other Javascript pages you read will probably refer frequently to objects, events, methods, and properties. This tutorial will teach by example, without focusing too heavily on OOP vocabulary. However, you will need a basic understanding of these terms to use other JavaScript references.

jQuery: Introduction

jQuery Introduction Step By Step Tutorial – Part 1: JQuery is a popular JavaScript library. With jQuery, you can build more interesting and interactive web page easy. jQuery automate common tasks and simplify complicated writing code. jQuery have ability to assist in wide range of task. This is one reason this library become popular choice.

What JQuery Does

• Access parts of page. jQuery offers a robust and efficient selector mechanism for retrieving exactly the piece of the document that is to be inspected or manipulated.
• Modify the appearance of a page. jQuery can bridge CSS browser standard gap.
• Alter the content a page. jQuery can modify texts, images,list, and entire of the HTML. All with a single easy-to-use API.
• Respond to a user’s interaction with a page. The jQuery library have an elegant way to intercept a wide variety of events without the need to clutter the html code itself with event handlers.
• Add animation. Implementing such interactive behaviors.
• AJAX support. Retrieve information from server without refreshing a page.
• Simplify common JavaScript task.

Web Meets World (web 2.0)

Web 2.0

The commercial web is now a teenager—it’s been fifteen short years since Marc Andreessen released the Mosaic browser. To put this in perspective, television as a commercial medium reached its fifteenth birthday in 1956—the year Elvis Presley made his first appearance on national TV. National news broadcasts were still in their infancy, “As The World Turns” debuted as America’s first half-hour soap opera, and “The Price Is Right” began its dominance of the game show genre. Commercial grade videotape recorders emerged, portable black and white television sets were introduced, and the first local color broadcast aired in Chicago.

Fifteen years after television’s birth, the contours of the new medium were just emerging. The idea that this revolutionary new phenomenon—one busily reshaping the very fabric of society—might one day become just another application on a vast web of computers, well that idea wasn’t exactly in vogue.

In the first four years of the Web 2.0 Summit, we’ve focused on our industry’s challenges and opportunities, highlighting in particular the business models and leaders driving the Internet economy. But as we pondered the theme for this year, one clear signal has emerged: our conversation is no longer just about the Web. Now is the time to ask how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world’s most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web’s greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we’re expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we’ll endeavor to bring these groups together.

Adobe Flex

Adobe Flex is a collection of technologies released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross platform rich Internet applications based on the proprietary Adobe Flash platform. The initial release in March 2004 by Macromedia included a software development kit, an IDE, and a J2EE integration application known as Flex Data Services. Since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, subsequent releases of Flex no longer require a license for Flex Data Services, which has become a separate product rebranded as LiveCycle Data Services.

In February 2008, Adobe released the Flex 3 SDK under the open source Mozilla Public License. Adobe Flash Player, the runtime on which Flex applications are viewed, and Adobe Flex Builder, the IDE built on the open source Eclipse platform and used to build Flex applications, remain proprietary.

History of Ajax Components

Ajax is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. However, rather than functioning as an acronym it better describes a technique for producing faster, more interactive, and usable web pages that don’t require re-loading every time a user changes a request. This is accomplished by increasing web page responsive-ness through the exchange of small pieces of data by an invisible server. The prerequisites of Ajax are a collaboration of HXTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that help represent the markup language, client-sided description languages like JavaScript, objects like XMLHTTPRequest that allow the asynchronous transfer of data, and the formatting provided by XML (Extensible Markup Language).

Again, Ajax is a technique, not an object. Jesse James Garrett coined Ajax in 2005 in a presentation to clients. The components that make up Ajax existed well before they were implemented to increase web page usability. This article will describe the development of the components that make up Ajax and their uses.

Background

As aforementioned, the components that provide the framework for Ajax execution include the following: 1) HXTML, that blends HTML and XML functions, 2) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that present markup languages intelligibly and style web content, 3) client-sided description languages like JavaScript, 4) XMLHTTPRequest objects.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the primary markup language for web pages. Markup languages represent text and extra information about the text that corresponds to structure and presentation. Originally conceived by the on-line publishing industry to interact with manuscripts, markup languages transitioned into the digital age through HTML. HTML describes the structure of certain web page text and further complements that description with interactive forms and objects that affect web browser behavior.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is considered a general-purpose markup language. XML is an open, standard language that facilitates data sharing across information systems, particularly those connected via the Internet. The latest version of HXTML 1.1 became a W3C (World Wide Web Conference) recommendation and, therefore, an industry standard in 2001.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) display the presentation of markup written document. This style sheet language, which is also standardized by W3C, presents structured documents whose content is reusable in a variety of contexts. Content can be attached to different logics to create different presentations of the same data. Style sheets have existed since the 1970’s and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). CSS Level 1 became usable in 1996. By 1998, CSS Level 2 was W3C recommended. As of 2006, CSS Level 3 is still under development. The main CSS contribution allows a document’s style to be influenced by multiple style sheets. The cascading effect comes from the ability of style sheets to ‘cascade’ from one another, inheriting a stylistic mixture determined by the site designer and user.

Javascript is a scripting language created to enable prototype-based programming. It is most popularly used for web sites. Its only similarity with Java the programming language is its C syntax. Javascript was developed in 1995 and trademarked by Sun Microsystems. It was licensed for use with Netscape Communications when Netscape began to support Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. Currently, Javascript also operates for other entities like the Mozilla Foundation. As of 2006, the latest model of this scripting language is Javascript 1.7.

XMLHTTPRequest object allows for the asynchronous exchange of data between the server and the client. It is an API (application program interface) that uses Javascript to transfer text data like XML using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) thereby establishing independent communication between the server-side and client-side of a web page. Microsoft developed it in 2000 as a part of Outlook Web Access. Mozilla incorporated XMLHTTPRequest in 2002 and Apple incorporated it into Safari 2.1 soon after.

Uses

The uses of these Ajax components work together to allow for automatic, user-based alterations of web pages. As an application of HTML in XML, XHTML allows for automated web processing through the use of the standard XML library. CSS is primarily used to stylize web pages and making them more easily understandable to users. Javascript allows accessibility to the DOM (Direct Object Model) to allow for dynamic information presentation and increased interactivity. The DOM is a standard object model that renders HTML, XML and other related formats. XMLHTTPRequest is important in Ajax web development techniques to increase web page responsiveness and interactivity. For example, it is currently used in Google’s Gmail services and MapQuest among other highly interactive sites.

Points of Interest

The technologies outlined above work together to comprise Ajax programming. The primary benefits of this suite of technologies allow users to access and create web applications more quickly with a level of responsiveness usually attributed to desktop applications. This increased responsiveness is coupled with increased interactivity that doesn’t make it necessary for the web page to reload every time a user makes a new request of the web application.

Ajax Challenges Web Development Leaders — And Web Publishers And Advertisers

Fredric Paul

A do-it-yourself approach to creating Web software called Ajax relies on a mishmash of existing Web technologies to create a new breed of fast, highly interactive sites. The trend is already befuddling traditional vendors of Web development software, and if these kinds of interactive apps continue to catch on, they could force Web publishing, advertising, and traffic-measurement companies to change how they do business.

Exemplified by Google Maps and Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing site, Ajax is an umbrella term for a mix of JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, and XML used to reduce the need for Web clients to reconnect to a Web server every time they attempt to download information.

The idea is for sites to update their contents in a background cache so that the next piece of information is ready to display as needed. These rich micro-interactions mean that the page itself doesn’t have to reload, only the portion with fresh data actually changes. Less data needed to be transferred makes for faster downloads, which makes for a better user experience. The Sabre online reservations system, for example, is reportedly starting to use Ajax to make it easier to deal with the database’s huge data set.

jQuery is a new type of JavaScript library.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

“You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind.” – Dave Methvin

Step into Open Source

Open Source

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.

One of our most important activities is as a standards body, maintaining the Open Source Definition for the good of the community. The Open Source Initiative Approved License trademark and program creates a nexus of trust around which developers, users, corporations and governments can organize open-source cooperation.