Flash thoughts

I've come to the stunning conclusion that ... wait for it ... Flash is hard!

What this means in real terms is that I'm having a little trouble focusing on good pedagogy because I'm having such difficulty in wrestling with the software.

Right now, my draft is about 1/3rd complete, and I can already tell that it's not really any more engaging than a web page. So far, I'm not really using Flash to do anything that PowerPoint couldn't do. I feel like I'm kind of spinning my wheels here.

I have some ideas, but I'm not sure how to make them happen. One idea is to have pictures that (when the user mouses-over them), go from small pics within the stage to big pictures that fill up the stage. I'm not 100% sure how to accomplish that.

Things tend to take a lot of time to do in Flash, even simple text and picture entry, and I'm a bit worried about how I'm really going to make this "pop."

Flash

I'm starting to get the beginning of a feeling of confidence with Flash, which is good. It certainly has a steep learning curve, but the things you can do with it are nothing short of incredible.

Photoshop project

We turned in our Photoshop projects last week.

I was pretty proud of mine, and the people who'd seen it before I turned it in seemed to like it. Until the feedback section, when everybody seemed to have a criticism for it. That was a little depressing.

But then, when class ended, Rongfei explained how to make the changes everyone had been suggesting (especially masking the train's smoke so that the edges appeared semi-transparent and "smokey"). I really appreciated that, and I left feeling really good about the class, my project, and my fellow students (and, of course, our professor, Dr. Wang, who's doing a great job).

So thank you, everybody (and especially Rongfei).

Photoshop First Contact

This is the first time I've really used Photoshop CS3, though I'm quite familiar with its freeware and open-source competitors, Paint.net and G.I.M.P.

It was quite cool - very powerful and easy to use (despite the fact that it crashed on me once and took a long time to open). I can see why it's the "gold standard" of image-editing software.

First Thoughts

I've really enjoyed playing with Photoshop, and I'm really looking forward to learning Flash. It seems to me that Flash is a nearly perfect vehicle for creating easily portable educational products (learning games, presentations, etc).

My only "downer" so far is that the CS3 Deals site Dr. Wang mentioned in her syllabus seems to be "sold out" of CS3 products.