Trainers Talk Tech

Heads up! The Adobe CS5 Suite is shipping! I have downloaded the trial versions of the CS5 suite for my Mac (reviews coming soon), and am going to be upgrading my client machine to the newly released eLearning Suite 2! (NOTE: It will be released mid-June. I got a little too excited!) Yes, during this last round of upgrades, they created another eLearning Suite and an upgrade to Captivate.

The eLearning Suite 2 contains:

• Captivate 5
• Flash CS5
• Photoshop CS5 Extended
• Dreamweaver CS5
• Presenter 7
• Soundbooth CS5
• Acrobat 9

Interesting that Soundbooth isn't included in the Web suite now, and that Presenter is still version 7. I have a love/hate thing with PowerPoint and eLearning (don't get me started), but I recently created an interactive PDF with Presenter that my client loved so I can't totally hate it.

It's interesting that Adobe didn't upgrade Presenter this round. Makes me wonder if they are going to drop the tool, or more likely, integrate Captivate tools into PPT. Makes you think though...

However, something that I cannot wait to try, is Captivate 5 ON THE MAC. Yes, this is the first iteration of Captivate that runs on a Mac! I really like Captivate and what it can do for certain eLearning projects, and now that it runs on the Mac, it makes me very happy. I'll let you know my opinions of the new Captivate 5 on both the PC and the Mac this month.

Thanks to Adobe for releasing upgrades to products I love to use! Now, if we can just figure out a way to get Apple and Adobe to play nice, my world will be a better place!

Just an FYI...I lost about four hours development time today because Flash CS4 continually crashed after a 2 second live time. Yep...open a file and then 2 seconds later it would close down.

Here were my steps to resolve it on my Mac with OS X:

1) Repair Disk Permissions
2) Reset preferences
3) Reset user settings
4) Uninstall and then reinstall

None of this worked.

5) 45 minutes on hold with tech support who directed me to a web page, FOUR TIMES, that resulted in a 404 error each time.

Finally, the solution that worked is to

6) Turn off all my fonts. Yep, turn all of them off in Font Book, and then turn them back on as the system calls for them, or as Flash needs them.

Turn off my fonts!!! Since when do fonts cause an expensive and complex program like Flash to crash. Whatever.

It's easy to turn off fonts in Font Book (right mouse click on Computer and choose Disable Fonts) and the Mac asks permission to turn them on as you need them, but here's the kicker.

It worked fine last night. Today, I didn't install any fonts, I just opened Flash files and wanted to work. What mystical creature got into my Mac last night and played with font settings?

I don't know, but man, I hope this saves you a call to Adobe tech support...Adobe, I love ya, but please get me a stable version of Flash.

I have to admit I'm a bit saddened by the face that I could not find a single WYSIWYG HTML writing software that works in the cloud. Maybe the requirements are too high for an online app...I don't know. However I did find some tiny footprint programs that can be downloaded from the web and installed on the Netbook. If you don't want to have the power of Dreamweaver installed on your Netbook (or the amount of space this application takes up - 500MB and counting), here are some software recommendations for you.

KompoZer
KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

KompoZer has both a WYSIWYG mode AND a coding mode, just like the big guys. It has a Site Manager function with built in FTP, and is available for PC, Mac and Linux machines. The best part is that KompoZer has a tiny download size (7.6 MB for Windows, 11.0 MB for Mac and 10.3 MB for Linux) - perfect for the Netbook!

SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey calls itself a "suite" of software packages built on the Mozilla source code. It contains a browser, email client, newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools. All I'm concerned about it whether or not it can write code in both a WYSIWYG format and code view. Composer is the name of the application included in the SeaMonkey application. It can do both, but they are not very robust. While utilizing a "tab" approach, the application does its job and nothing more. Many of the color cues in the code and basic features aren't there. It lets you write code and then preview it. Not bad, but just not interesting. It's just the basics.

SeaMonkey is larger than KompoZer (13MB for Windows, 23MB for Mac and 14MB for Linux) but contains all the applications in one download. Installation was easy. Check it out! At least the price is right!

Bluefish
The last one I want to bring to your attention is Bluefish. Although it is not a WYSIWYG writer (they call it a What You See is What You Need (WYSIWYN) interface!!!!!), it is an amazingly powerful text editor. If you started by writing your own code by hand, then this application will bring you back to those days. It's not only for writing web page code, but can also handle other programming languages as well. As a web guy, I appreciate the table and frame wizards and lots of tool-bars created especially for me. I loved this tool, but it can be intimidating for people who don't want to know code. I thought I would include it here for powerusers who may be thinking about a Netbook.