Alex

Alex

Alex's background in the technology industry goes back over 20 years, during which time he has worked for organisations such as the Metropolitan Police, Plessey Naval Systems, and Abbott Mead Vickers. Alex has been a fulltime instructor with Highlander for a number of years, having been involved in training for the last 15 years, and is a regular contributor to beta programmes for Adobe's core products. Alex is an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) and Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) for InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, ActionScript and DreamWeaver. In addition he also teaches courses on CSS, Fireworks, Quark, PHP and MySQL.

Importing Excel documents into InDesign – a date problem

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 312011
 

Recently I was training an advanced InDesign course, and one of trainees had come across a problem and asked me for advice. The problem she had come across was, whenever she imported Excel documents into InDesign, the dates switched formats.

What was happening was that the date was formatted within Excel as an english date format (say 1/12/11) but after importing into InDesign it swapped into an American date format (12/1/11). And she could not figure out why.

After a few minutes of investigation I finally figured out why. Here is a screenshot of a simple Excel table. Just a column of dates, formatted (you might think) in the English date format.  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on May 31, 2011

What are epubs?

 InDesign  No Responses »
May 122011
 

This post deals with epub – what are they and how do we create them.  I have found that people tend to get confused when talking about epub – electronic publications – as, technically, any document on a computer could be considered an epub document.  So, what is epub?

Basically they are a specific type of electronic document, and we are talking about three main types here…

epub, pdfs, and rich/dynamic publications  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on May 12, 2011  Tagged with: , ,

New features in Flash CS5.5 no:1 – enhanced layer control

 Flash  1 Response »
Apr 212011
 
new layer commands in Flash CS5.5

new layer commands in Flash CS5.5

Unless you have been living under a rock the last couple of weeks, you will be aware that Adobe have announced an incremental upgrade to CS5 – CS5.5. As a result, I thought I would post some details on what is exactly new in Flash CS5.5 – and is it worth upgrading or waiting for CS6.

I will take a particular feature and blog about it and give you an example of its use, so you can make up your own mind as to whether it is worthwhile. So here goes – New features in Flash CS5.5 no:1 – Enhanced layer control.  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on April 21, 2011  Tagged with: ,

Creating an asteroid in Blender 2.5

 Blender  No Responses »
Apr 212011
 

Another website I keep an eye on is Andrew Price’s website at blenderguru.com. Recently he did a lovely tutorial on creating an asteroid in Blender 2.5 and animating it…

http://www.blenderguru.com/how-to-make-a-realistic-asteroid/

I recommend you have a look at his site if you are at all interested in Blender and 3D work. And here is my asteroid, created by following his example…

An asteroid created using Blender 2.5

…and here is the timelapse movie showing the steps that i took…

Making an Asteroid
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0:58
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123

… and here is the final animation (not perfect by any means) that I created…  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on April 21, 2011  Tagged with: , , , ,

Blender 2.5 Intro course results

 Blender  No Responses »
Apr 132011
 

We recently ran our first Blender 2.5 Introduction course, and I just wanted to share some of the models and animations that I created during that course.

Some simple examples of shapes and materials created within Blender

Some simple examples of shapes and materials created within Blender

Disclaimer: It is only a four day course so the models are necessarily primitive, but useful nevertheless. To teach how to model a high detail human figure can take days, so we just created a simple figure – head, arms and legs. No fingers, toes, etc. Then we added a material and did a very simple animation with it (again learning how to do proper walk cycles etc is the job of another course entirely).  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on April 13, 2011  Tagged with: , , ,

Blender and Ocean Sim

 Blender  No Responses »
Apr 072011
 

There are various branches of Blender in existence, and one of the ones I was keeping an eye on was the Ocean Sim branch. The people behind this brilliant project raised some money to port over an Ocean Simulator modifier to the main Blender branch.

Recently they produced a public build of Blender that works with their new modifier and it is blinding. I thought I would post a quick example that I made using this tutorial.

Here is a simple example I got going in a few minutes of playing around…  Read more...

ocean and object v3.mov
Runtime
 Posted by Alex on April 7, 2011  Tagged with: , , , ,

ebooks, Kindles, and the iPad

 InDesign  No Responses »
Feb 202011
 

During my research for our epub course, I purchased a kindle. I wanted to see the difference between epub books on this compared to my iPad. Having played around with it for a week or so now (admittedly not very long) I thought I would jot down my thoughts on ebooks, Kindles, and the iPad.

First off, let me clarify some things – I had already purchased an iPad last christmas. I read a lot – a lot of printed books, and a lot of ebooks, usually in pdf, but now more and more in epub or kindle format. As a dedicated reader, I was interested to see how I would feel reading ebooks on the two devices, and compare them to reading a printed book.  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on February 20, 2011  Tagged with: , , ,

Modelling with Blender

 Blender  1 Response »
Feb 102011
 

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The more I use Blender, the more I see how modelling with Blender can produce fantastic results, with some people making it more of an artform. To show you what I mean, here are some links that show you just what a great Blender modeller can do (the second link shows you how collaborating can produce great work as well)…

Andy Goralczyk - Speed Modelling
Runtime
7:54
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7,757

 Read more...

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 Posted by Alex on February 10, 2011  Tagged with: , , ,

What is wireframing?

 actionscript 3  2 Responses »
Jan 142011
 

This post is about introducing the concept of wireframing – specifically what is wireframing and do you need it/should you use it.

With the advent of the iPhone, iPad, tablets and smartphones in general, I have often found myself with the need to first draw a rough sketch of my idea to show people. Initially I just used pencil and paper, but then I wondered – are there apps out there for me use? and should I use them?  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on January 14, 2011  Tagged with: , ,

Bookmarklets

 HTML5  No Responses »
Jan 042011
 

What are bookmarklets? For those of you who do not know, they are a browser bookmark that has JavaScript inside them – instead of a url. What this means is that these bookmarklets as they are called, actually run a series of JavaScript commands. As a result they have become an important tool for me when I am teaching and surfing the web. Let me share with you some of my favourite bookmarklets…

Markup - http://markup.io/

MarkUp lets you draw on any webpage with a variety of tools to express your ideas etc. You can even share the resulting image.  Read more...

 Posted by Alex on January 4, 2011  Tagged with:
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