A friend of mine recently stated that they wanted to learn graphics and wondered if I could recommend any good websites.

Graphics is a pretty wide ranging topic and my own experience is still growing so this is the response I provide, which might help other people as well.

  ~~~~~~~

What type of graphics are you trying to learn? There’s a pretty wide range of potential items to consider.

Camtasia is considered to be one of the best screen video capture and editing programs. Its not cheap at about $300 or $180 with an education discount. Camtasia studio comes bundled with SnagIT also (normally about $30). SnagIt is pretty much an essential tool for bloggers doing static screen shots, but its actually kind of cool for creating flash images rapidly and on the fly with clickable or hover over items.

On the graphics side I use the following programs regularly:

1. Snagit for day to day blogging images and basic image manipulation - sometimes some light web design graphic images.
2. Camtasia - Excellent for turning a presentation into a video (any format including flash) You can also capture video of your computer screen with easy zoom and focusing options.
1. 
3. Jing - free video capture program made by TechSmith that also makes Camtasia. This is a very limited video capture program, very easy. Only enables output to swf files for embedding as flash (no .avi or .wmv or .mov options which means you can’t make the video viral)
4. Fireworks - good for taking a graphic designed image and converting a concept into a web page in Dreamweaver (made by Macromedia owned by Adobe and bundled with Creative Suite 3)
5. Photoshop - Good for creating the designed image above to make a web site concept (made by Adobe bundled in Creative Suite 3)
6. Illustrator - Good for logos and other parts of images to then send to Photoshop  (also bundled in Creative Suite 3)
7. Flash - I actually don’t use this much the last 9 months. SnagIt and Camtasia(this month) are probably going to cover most of my flash work as they make it easier than Flash itself.  (bundled in Creative Suite 3 also)

Money Savings Tip! Now Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash all come together if you buy Adobe Creative Suite 3.  That retails for $1700 unless you are student.  Then you can buy it for about $589  through Campus Tech.

That may seem like a lot for a student, but it is not all that much and if you are a college student that needs to find a way to make $600 to buy the software, I can help point you in the right direction.  If you are not a college student, but you want your school aged children to learn how to use this software, they can qualify for an educational discount if they are in k - 12 or in college. 

For an $1100 savings, it might not hurt to go sign up for some college courses yourself.  Might have to forego a new pair of Nike golf shoes and some time on the links, but picking up some new job skills and learning how to use this great software could do your career some wonders.

All that said we are both doing it the hard way. Graphics is much much easier if you have a Mac. Doing graphics on a PC is like doing this stuff with your mouse hand tied behind your back.  (my friend and I both came out of the corporate world and still rely to heavily on personal computers)

Not sure what you are trying to do first with graphics, but I’d recommend getting the software above as you prioritize it and then learning it. Once you figure out which software program you are trying to learn I can probably help you more figuring out where to go.

Page Popularity for Site: 35% [?]

I have a weird and slightly lazy dream to some day sit in my favorite recliner and productively work my tail off in comfort.  A couple months back, I even did a little experiment.  I positioned my portable projector from the office at the ceiling of my house and reclined a recliner back.  I set up my laptop keyboard on an inclined keyboard holder and typed away while laying back and looking straight ahead at the ceiling.

I’ll admit that it worked but not as well as I would have liked.  I was very comfortable, but the distance was a little to short to get the projected image large enough to be comfortable. 

Canon does have some new projectors that have an amazing capacity to make very large images from a short distance.  You can even look at a mindmap at like 20% zoom and see the individual topics extremely clearly but I digress.

Anyway, my idea or day dream was slightly reinforced about a week and a half back while I was attending CES in Las Vegas.  I came across the i-FI chair that I would describe as a recliner with the sound system built into it. 

Now, I have never been terribly impressed with the concepts of investing in home theater furniture such that you feel like you have a miniature movie theater in your house.  I’ll take a great couch or recliner any day.  I do not need something that feels like a goofy theater seat chair.

Plus, I have three kids under 10 and its not too hard for them to regularly recreate that spilled sticky ambience on any given surface in the house!

Amazing Voice Clarity in the Sound

Now, as I test drove this chair at CES, I rapidly learned what almost everyone there learned.  The sound quality is not only great, but for very loud movies engineered for surround sound, you can understand what people are saying as if there is not a lot of surround sound background noise. 

I’m sure you’ve probably watched a movie at home where you had to turn the sound up to 40 to hear the words and then when the action picks up, all the trim in your house is vibrated away to dust.  This chair seems to eliminate that catch 22.  Plus, it has a very cool built in ability to create a sound vibration in the chair without cranking up a sub woofer that can be felt in the ground from 10 miles away like listening to a freight train through a rail road track.

(video of the LA Times here, I’m standing in the background in some of the frames, but the LA times video is kind of rough, they are writers and not film types I guess)

 

All in all, I’m not crazy about the name that the i-Fi Company has come up with but in all fairness this is not only a chair for to work with your home entertainment system, but it is also an iPod accessory that enables you to dock your iPod.  So they seem to have the obligatory ‘i’ in the name.  That said, I can’t think of a better name to counter my critical view of their name, so I guess I should just leave it there.  Its priced at about the level you could expect for a high end comfortable leather recliner.

Page Popularity for Site: 38% [?]

I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 - includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.

Page Popularity for Site: 45% [?]

So iPhone users are starting to experience the joy that comes from doing business with the worlds oldest phone company, at&t.  Their iPhone web surfing and texting transactions are itemized and printed out on detailed pages.

One user put together this short little video showing her 300 PAGE phone bill from at&t.

She posts a nice message at the end of the video encouraging people not to kill forests with their iPhone and change their default billing format to something that won’t require a back brace to move from the mail box to the house.

Disclaimer: I refuse to do business with at&t on principle. They slammed me into a $2.50 per minute calling plan in 2000 when I relocated from Illinois to Florida. They didn’t ask me nor did they tell me that they had slammed me into a higher rate. I didn’t learn about it until I received a long distance bill for $1,000+ Their response to their practice was almost as bad as the bill. As a result I will never do business with at&t again. I’m sure at&t will win over the hearts and minds of iPhone users across the US in similar fashion.

Its not exactly a problem I could call a product liability attorney about, but it sure did raise my blood pressure for several months as I had to deal with customer support on hold for about a total of 50 hours. (unsuccessfully I might add, I had to pay their trumped up bill in full and on time or risk having thems sabotage my credit for their thieving business practice.)

Page Popularity for Site: 22% [?]

Here’s a simple alert that should ring true with your common sense.  Wearing headphones for your iPod during a lightning storm is a good way to blow your mind, literally.  A man wearing headphones attached to his iPod was struck by lightning.

Now that would typically flash over a person and a minor amount of damage would happen.  However, when the electricity hits something metallic, like headphones in the ears, or the wire attached to the iPod or that shiny metal backed iPod itself, that electricity is going to burn and penetrate. (Listening to MP3s in a storm could blow your mind - health)

So if a storm crops up, get out of harms way.  Leave the iPod home or in the car.  You might even want to pick up a water proof accessory to drop your iPod into if it starts to storm so that you’ll be protected from the burn.

But if you just have to listen to your music while you are outside in a lightning storm maybe you should pick up some car or truck accessories that let you crank up your music or audio book and blast it from your vehicle at a distance.

That or just take a day off from exercise.

Page Popularity for Site: 14% [?]