(*or How to get from A to B via X,Y and Z!)

Ever wondered how it might be possible to produce a nice 3-D screensaver “very quickly” with no programming knowledge and just a tiny bit of effort? Well, recently I set up a pair of dedicated catalogue PCs in the Language Resource Centre. Using Active Directory Group Policy I locked them down pretty reasonably well, and set the display to never switch off. In order to prevent too much screen burn (and without using lotion!), I decided to enforce a customised screensaver through Group Policy via User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Personalization / Enable  screen saver  and User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Personalization / Force specific screensaver with a Screen saver timeout set in the policy to 300 seconds.

I used Xara3D 6 to create a project of an animated, rotating 3D textured text which displayed the following information over a couple of lines: “LRC CATALOGUE: TOUCH SCREEN to access” (Note: we purchased a copy of this software quite a while ago – but now I believe it is available as freeware (see Tom’s Guide). There was an option within Xara 3D to export the project as a screensaver. (.scr) file. Done!  Or so I thought. Nothing is ever quite so easy! I could not get this screen saver to work. So I went back into the project and exported it as a Flash animation (swf file). I then downloaded and installed InstantStorm, quite a nifty little freeware Flash screensaver creator. Using this software I was able to rapidly convert my swf file into a standalone scr file. With a little bit of fiddling to get the size right for the screens in question.

Due to possible incompatibility issues with 64-bit Windows (documented in the software), I had to install this screensaver from a different location than the normal %SystemRoot%\system32 (or SysWoW64) location. Again via Group Policy under User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Personalization / Force specific screensaver / Screen saver executable name.

Bit of a faff-on, but a relatively cheap and quite non-technical way to produce a screensaver! Definitely going from A to B via X,Y and Z. But then hey, it got the job done!

I’ve been looking at creating an on-line audio recorder for potential use on language learning websites. Most solutions out there seem to revolve around javascript and Flash, and I’ve already successfully played around with these to produce a Flash-based (user-agent limited) solution. But what if you want to develop for the iPad, or an Android device? HTML 5  still seems to be in its infancy with regard to audio capture, understandably since producing an all-encompassing, secure, easy-to-use method for manipulating a device’s microphone system for on-line use is no mean feat. I’m going to be keeping an eye out on the (slow but) steadily evolving audio/video capture standards in HTML 5. (useful link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/) This seems to be the way forward. Flash is dead (!) – long live Flash!

One great feature of Adobe Captivate 6 is the native PPTX support which allows media-rich Powerpoint slides to be imported without losing any features such as embedded audio, animations and transitions. I’ve been looking at Captivate with a view to using existing Powerpoint resources and building a little more interactivity into them, using branching and menus. Good stuff.

I came across this post from TechRepublic recently. A good read. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-integrated-development-environment-applications/1846?tag=nl.e101&s_cid=e101&ttag=e101

Started to look at Adobe Captivate as an e learning developer tool today. It seems to be quite feature rich, but runs a little slowly on my old (and slightly bloated) core 2 quad PC. Installation took a fair while, but the program seems fairly stable and the user workspace is not too difficult to get to grips with. And consistent in look and feel with other Adobe products.