Web Teacher » Software

Useful links: Forms, WeTopia, Moodle, 24 Ways

vdebolt — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:50:09 +0000

How to Make Forms more Usable with HTML5 is a good tutorial from Steven Bradley.

The new WeTopia game on Facebook is described by TechCrunch. This game is a perfect example of what Jane McGonigal and other thinkers say about using game theory to create social good.

NC State U evaluates the accessibility of Moodle 2.1.1.

If you are like me and your subscription to 24 ways has been languishing quietly in your feed reader since last December, you know that 24 Ways is back. If not, be sure to check them out and have a great December with 24 Ways.

QR codes resources

vdebolt — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:31:39 +0000

The Daring Librarian has a lot of material about QR codes on Flickr and her CC license allows for use with attribution. Check it out.

Useful links: top 25 books, edu conferences, blue beanie day, semantics, Think Up

vdebolt — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:23:57 +0000

The top 25 books for web developers and designers from .net is a good list to check to see if you’re keeping up with the latest. I noticed that several of the 25 are from A Book Apart. That led me to tweet this:

Is there some sort of brain implant that would directly feed every publication from A Book Apart into my brain?Sun Nov 13 17:26:02 via TweetDeckVirginia DeBolt
vdebolt

Oddly, there were people on Twitter who didn’t see the humor in that and suggested I should read the books. With my eyes. Because I don’t want you to worry about me, you should know that I am reading them. With my eyes.

Conferencepalooza suggests some good conferences for high ed folks. Check it out, there might be a great one there. You do know that SXSW is holding a special pre-conference for EDU this year, don’t you? It’s SXSWEDU.

Get out your blue beanie and join Chris in giving thanks for web standards on Nov. 30, 2011 – Blue Beanie Day. Why should we give thanks, Chris asks? Because the bums lost!

Installment 3 in a round robin of posts about semantics. This one from Paul Irish explains enough about the first two that you can follow even if you haven’t read them. (Why haven’t you read them!)

Think Up is new software that Gina Trapani announced was out of beta yesterday. It does all of what I was wishing Twitter would do plus more with Facebook and Google+. It’s installed or your server or can run from the Amazon cloud for a monthly fee. I think Think Up is going to be big.

Useful links: Triberr, Hidden, WebVTT

vdebolt — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:24:09 +0000

That Tech Chick has a post about a new social tool called Triberr. You might want to give it a spin to see if it increases traffic to your blog.

Hidden is a nice app for Macs. If your Mac is stolen, it sends you a location and photos of the thief.

Recent developments around WebVTT.

People have been asking me lots of questions about WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) recently. Questions about its technical nature such as: are the features included in WebVTT sufficient for broadcast captions including positioning and colors? Questions about its standardisation level: when is the spec officially finished and when will it move from the WHATWG to the W3C? Questions about implementation: are any browsers supporting it yet and how can I make use of it now?

Useful links: captioning YouTube, HTML5, or not, Final Cut Pro X

vdebolt — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:54:15 +0000

YouTube’s instructions on how to add captions to your video.

How is HTML5 changing web development? An interview with Remy Sharp.

Stop Obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3. Paul Boag has some ideas about what we should be thinking about instead of merely worrying about learning HTML5 and CSS3. What I want to know is does Paul – or any web educator – think topics like those he suggests need to be part of a comprehensive web education curriculum?

Microformats 2 and RFDa Collaboration references where these two are heading and includes a mention of schema.org. [See also: Modifying an hReview to include HTML from schema.org.]

Final Cut Pro Reactions:

BlueGriffon

vdebolt — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:48:15 +0000

A new web standards compliant WYSIWYG web editor is now available at bluegriffon.org. Features include that it’s open source and free, plus it does:

HTML5 – including forms, video and audio
CSS3 – including D Transforms, Transitions, Shadows, Linear/Radial Gradients and Repeating Gradients, Border Images, Columns, Flex Box Model
SVG
MathML
a user interface to work with some important ARIA attributes

It’s based on the Gecko rendering engine and works in Linux, Mac and Windows. Although the software is free, they are selling add ons for a few Euros each. The MathML, for example, is an add on.

You can, of course, toggle between code and design views.

A hat tip to @mollydotcom who tweeted the news.

Proud of @glazou – he made a very sweet WYSIWYG editor. x-platform, HTML5, CSS3, SVG, MathML – very cool! http://t.co/qnoV3CeWed May 11 11:54:36 via Tweet ButtonMolly E. Holzschlag
mollydotcom

Big News from Adobe

vdebolt — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:17:55 +0000

In Introducing Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Product Family, Adobe made some announcements important to educators.

First, they are moving milestone releases such as CS3, CS4, and CS5 to a two year cycle. The in between years will get updates like the just announced CS5.5. Here’s what they are doing to the web suite.

For Web folks: huge updates to HTML5 and Adobe Flash authoring tools, enabling designers and developers to deliver mobile applications on Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, iOS and other platforms — and create rich browser-based content across screens. All the big HTML5 checkboxes are ticked in Dreamweaver CS5.5: jQuery mobile framework integration for browser-based content, PhoneGap’s in, as well as WebKit engine updates. We’ve also launched Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 Premium and the Flex 4.5 framework now includes mobile support. Now hundreds of millions of mobile devices can be targeted with content and apps, created through our web tools. Remember, Adobe tools support the development of both HTML and Flash content, don’t let crazy headlines make you think otherwise.

Secondly, they announced a subscription plan that means users will always have access to the most up to date version of the software for a monthly subscription fee. The Adobe announcement page does not show specific subscription pricing, but an article I linked to yesterday in a Useful Links post does gave a chart of subscription pricing.

Both these announcements are important to web educators, especially the news that Dreamweaver will come equipped to write HTML5.

Useful Links: Rent your software, new RFP rules, Photoshop SDK, higher education

vdebolt — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:04:45 +0000

You Can Rent Photoshop and other Adobe Software gives you some useful and potentially helpful information.

The New RFP says RFP and procurement process for software should start with finding software that doesn’t suck.

Speaking of Adobe, because of an open SDK, developers are now creating Photoshop apps for tablet devices. Adobe Turns the Tablet Into a Photoshop Companion.

Here’s one for the educators. Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet, It’s Higher Education. I’m looking forward to the discussion on this one – check out the comments at TechCrunch.

Blogger gets a makeover

vdebolt — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:32:08 +0000

[Ed.: This article was cross-posted at BlogHer.]

At SXSW Interactive this week, Google announced a refresh of the interface for its popular Blogger blogging platform. The software hasn’t been updated in years, although it remains one of the most popular blogging tools on the Web.

Blogger Product Manager Chang Kim calls the refresh “our next-generation user interface.” The changes will roll out over 2011 in stages, so don’t expect to open up your Blogger blog and find it completely different in one big step. The user interface is the big news, but there are several improvements, among them new mobile themes and something Blogger is calling a ‘content discovery engine’ that “that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading.”

On the geekier side, the new changes will incorporate the Google Web Toolkit. This may not matter much to you if you’re using a blogspot URL, but if you hosting a Blogger blog on your own server, this will mean you have more control over the features you can manipulate.

For everyday use, the interface will change to a sleeker and more up-to-date look. Here you see a new blog post screen showing the familiar older interface at the top, with the new look in front near the bottom.

The Dashboard will change as well. Here’s the new Dashboard.

At Free Technology for Teachers, the comment was made,

The new editor looks a lot like the Google Docs document editor.

Anna Leach at Shiny Shiny said,

They are smartening up the back-end of the site – making it easier to see what you’re doing, and giving users a more intuitive preview of their work.

Google released a promotional video about Blogger.

Sarah Gooding at WPMU very helpfully listed the new features mentioned in the video.

The ability to easily customize templates without any CSS knowledge

Access to real-time stats

Improved spam filtering

Continued stability (The Blogger service has had zero downtime, according to Pingdom)

Inclusion of web fonts

A sleek mobile experience of the platform

Smart content discovery

Integration of the Google Web Toolkit

In an era when sites we’ve come to depend on (like Flickr) are being neglected or abandoned by their owners, it’s great that Google is stepping up to keep Blogger competitive and on the cutting edge.

HTML/Text editor recommendations

vdebolt — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 13:36:58 +0000

I got this email the other day:

I have a rather odd request to ask. I am trying to learn how to write web pages for fun and maybe more down the road. At present I have several different editors to choose from, and was wondering if you could give me some advice as to which one I should use as my primary editor. I have: Dreamweaver CS4, Notpad++(sic), TopStyle Pro 4.0.0.85 and UEStudio ’10 as my potential editors. The thing is I really want to learn hand coding from the ground up. I have both of your books, Intergraded (sic) HTML and CSS and Mastering Intergraded (sic) HTML and CSS for my learning the basics. I also have PDF books on learning JavaScript and HTML5, more books than I know what to do with.

I haven’t seen anyone talking about editors on a blog for a long time. Because of that, I thought I’d give a rather lengthy answer. And a lengthy answer sounds like a blog post, does it not? Here’s how I answered the email.

Each of those tools has its own pros and cons. If you are serious about hand coding, you might find UEStudio, with its excellent HTML text editor UltraEdit as a good choice. Coupling that with TopStyle Pro for help with writing CSS and you have the basics covered.

UltraEdit beats out Notepad in my book because you have color coding, search and replace, FTP, and much more that isn’t available with Notepad.

Dreamweaver – which can be used as a text editor in Code View – adds another dimension you don’t get from other tools. If you aren’t great at typing or spelling, which your email hints might be the case, using Code View in Dreamweaver to type code is pretty typo-proof. There are many site management tools in Dreamweaver: link management, validation tools, site-wide search and replace, built in JavaScripts, FTP, CSS tools, image editing and more. Plus you have the WYSIWYG view if you want it.

Any one of these tools can get the job done. Which do you feel most comfortable working in? Which one makes the most sense to you? That one is probably the right choice for you.

I have dozens and dozens of web design books at my house, too. I’ve read them all. I’ve given away sacks and sacks of them to Freecycle folks. There are more books to come. In this field, there’s always something new, always something more to learn. Get the basic building blocks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript under control and that gives you the foundation to build on.