TAAC 8, Macromedia's Eye View

Aaron Jones was one of several Macromedia employees to attend this year's TAAC conference. Aaron was good enough to take the time to write an article describing his experience there.
Well done Aaron, no longer a TAAC virgin :-)

Authorware finally gets a presence on DevNet!

Thanks to Amy Blankenship and Andrew Chemey for writing these cool articles for Authorware posted to the AW devnet page.

Andrew's article discusses creating AICC and SCORM compliant courses with Authorware. Amy's is a tutorial showing how you can use Fireworks to create great graphics for your Authorware courses.

Thanks to you both!

Oh - and please note there are several other great articles there too!

Want to put Flash in your Windows Pocket PC PDA?

Recently I was asked to put together a demo of a work aid tool to be used on a Pocket PC PDA.
The breif was simple. It needed to:
• work on Pocket PC
• be as lean as possible
• run from RAM or from a memory card, not via the Web
• run full screen
• be a simple, proof of concept memory aid, used as a ready reference that supplimented existing training.

After a little pain ( I don't enjoy working with Flash), the end result was a simple little XML-driven application. I have a version of it here, scaled to 480x640 for PC users, and a second version designed to run on Pocket PC, scaled to fit into the standard Pocket IE window. Note that the scaling means it is smaller than designed, as the real thing runs full-screen using Macromedia's Standalone Player for Pocket PC.

More PDA joy

I ordered a new PDA. There was nothing wrong with my old one, but I wanted more. Faster processor. More RAM. Integrated Wi-Fi. Now my PDA is fully connected to my home wireles LAN. I can send/receive emails, surf the Net, get files from my local machines, even control my server, all from the comfort of my bedroom, the yard ... anywhere.

Or I can go to Starbucks :-)

If you care, this is what I bought - Toshiba E755

Here is what I should have bought - Toshiba E805! It has a larger screen, higher resolution (480x640), VIOP, text to speech, voice commands. ... wow, PCs were not this good 5 or 6 years ago!

TAAC 8, been and gone

I couldn't make it to TAAC this year :-( Too busy between work and studies. By all accounts TAAC was a little quieter this year than of late, although no less informative or fun!

I see Mark has links to all previous year's TAAC presentations. Hopefully he will be able to get this year's presentations up soon.

EuroTAAC 2004 is in Edinburgh

EuroTAAC :: Authorware and eLearning conference

Thursday 25 March to Saturday 27 March 2004.

EuroTAAC is the premier conference in Europe for Authorware and all things eLearning

Latest News - EuroTAAC 2004

Where is EuroTAAC 2004?
I have decided to return to the beautiful Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Scotland (I took it there in 2002). Make a note in your diary - 22-27 March 2004, with the main conference taking place on 25-27 March. I am also planning post-conference training this year. Look out for further announcements soon.


EuroTAAC 2004. Go on! You know you want to!

Authorware 7.01 released

Macromedia has released an update to Authorware 7 that addresses a number of bugs discovered after AW 7 was released.

You can get the update from here http://www.macromedia.com/support/authorware/download.html

And there are extensive release notes here:-

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/authorware/701/releasenotes.html


Probably the most exciting improvement is the inclusion of the ability to update files from Authorware 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0 and 6.5 directly to Authorware 7

Useful stuff from Joshua Burkholder

Joshua Burkholder is one of the most talented AW developers about. He is also quite the Flash expert. Joshua has posted a number of useful files on hos web site

http://www.geocities.com/joshuaburkholder/

Using Authorware to extract CAB files

Have you ever wanted to extract files from a cabinet file (.CAB) using Authorware. alCabinet.u32 does just that - extract a file(s) from a .CAB. It's free and it's available from:
http://www.apixel.com/section05.htm#alcabinet

Video Magic in Authorware

alVideoMagic released. Have you ever wanted to play one video within another video, aka
"picture in a picture"? No, well try Apixel's new u32 - maybe it will change your mind :-)

alVideoMagic is a 32 bit UCD that uses DirectX 9 to play a secondary video within a primary video. It's pretty neat if not overly useful.

It's free and it available from:
http://www.apixel.com/section05.htm#alvideomagic

Authorware and SCORM

It was brought to my attention that Macromedia has the following article on their site. Nice to see an AWARE related item (SCORM)

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/authorware/articles/metadata_editor.html?trackingid=devnetupdate_email_100603

This is an excellent article form Sharon Brown.

Internet explorer changes to affect plugins

If you haven't read about the changes coming to Internet Explorer, you should have a good read of Macromedia's take, and their suggestions on how to work around the changes

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/