Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 10:20 pm. 0 comments
There are a lot of tutorial websites out on the web these days. A lot of databases containing links to tutorials for every piece of software you can think of. However, the best tutorials tend to come from sites targeted to one piece of software alone. It takes a lot of discovering to find such sites. But below, I will show you my picks of the most helpful, informative sites.
–Photoshop– PSDTuts has gained a lot of popularity over the past year. The tutorials are free for the most part, but sample .PSD files are available for download for a few bucks to help keep the site going. New tutorials are posted around 3 times per week, but the website already has a bunch of tutorials from the countless previous weeks. Every month PSDTuts also published a web roundup featuring a few of the best photoshop tutorials on the web from other sites. You can submit your own tutorials to the site if you want, and if accepted, the owner, Collis, will give you $125.00 for it.
–Flash Programming– The tutorials on Emanuele’s site are top notch. With a new article posted almost everyday, techniques are shown how how some flash game hits are made. Bloons, Tower Defense, etc…– Emanuele starts from scratch in multipart tutorials showing and explaining the code to replicate it. He also shows many tips on how to bring in revenue from your game. How to create a game and get it sponsored, or put in-game ads in it is a snap if you read this blog.
–Web Design– This online magazine is great if you want to learn how to improve a website. A List Apart is published around twice a month, containing 2 articles per publication. The List Apart has been around for a very long time though. At present it is at issue #255. The good, the bad, and the evil about web design is discussed including some tips and other very useful information.Am I missing something? Comment! I am interested to hear in other high class sites for specific tutorials like these.
Did you know Photoshop can take a video and make an animated image out of it? Yes, it can! Photoshop has the ability to import a video file and convert each frame into a layer and automatically animate it, heres how:
Find the video file you would like to use. If you only want to use a portion of it, don’t worry, photoshop will let you select that later.
In Photoshop CS3, go to file->Import->Video Frames to Layers…
Choose the video file you would like to use. (I’m going to use part of the MacBook Air commercial)
When you select which part of the video to use, you hole down the shift key and drag the playback marker thingy from where to start and where to finish. Keep the video short. Most video is 30FPS. We are only going to use every other frame. Limit yourself to around 10 second, which would be around 150 layers in photoshop, but more keep it as short as possible to keep the size of the file small.
You should resize the image (Image->Image Size) to whichever size you want the video to play. Remember, the smaller the better again. (I used 120 for the height, and let it automatically find the corresponding width by having constrain proportions checked).
Now that you have the video resized, you need extend the canvas for the rest of the signature. Go to Image>Canvas size and change it to the size you want your final image to be. (I used 500×130)
Now, select all of the layers. (Tip: Click layer 1, then shift-click the last layer), and select all of the frames (same tip), and move the video where you would like it placed. If you don’t select them first, the animation will get messed up.
Make sure all of the animation frames are selected when you move everything around. If you don’t, you will manually have to nudge it back!
Make a new layer under Layer one, and make you background on it.
Make a new layer on the top of the stacks, and make the image of your signature on it.
Add text on the top.
Make the last frame longer so it doesn’t seem like an infinite loop.
When you are done, File->Save for web & devices.
A window pops up. Save as .gif. Change the settings to get the lowest file size possible for an acceptable quality.
Now, clearly, I didn’t put too much time making this look good. I just placed video and text. However, the point of this tutorial wasn’t to make as good a signature as I could, but to show how to incorporate video.It is hard though. I only had 60 video frames, and it came out to 200 and some odd kb. I hope this was informative and you learned how to add video to a photosohp document!
There are some applications that are so amazing, every mac user should have. Although some are payware, the are limited and are definitely worth it. A lot of good applications are included with Macs in iLife, however there are still some that are necessary for the happiest mac-ing!
These applications pretty much cover it for me. iWork is awesome for me, but some business users would prefer something with more Microsoft compatibility should opt to the new Microsoft Office 2008. Adium is a great, muli-protocal instant messaging client thats more light weight than iChat. Perian allows for playing of many different types of media files from within quicktime. Photoshop, although expensive, is the greatest image editing program available.
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago at 8:48 pm. 2 comments
Hello,
A lot of people want to learn how to make applications. Mac OS X provides an easy way to do so. Every single (genuine) Apple Computer comes with XCode on it’s install disks. Using XCode and the Cocoa framework makes it easy to learn and make your own application. And it is how most major Mac OS software publishers do it. I have made a video tutorial to introduce you to XCode and the things you can do with it. Although the application is somewhat simple, it is necesary to learn with simple applications and gradually move on with increasingly more difficult apps.
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago at 5:21 pm. 1 comment
Yesterday,Apple finally decided to release updated MacBook Pros with the newest Penryn processors from intel. I headed to the apple store to purchase a 17″ baby for myself. So far, it has been amazing! The 17″ screen (matte) is brighter and bigger than I thought! All my applications launch instantly. The hard drive upgrade to 250Gb (from 160) in this generation of Macbook Pros is also a great benefit as well as the 512Mb VRAM they upgraded the 8600 to.Now, as opposed to a hackintosh I built, I have a real genuine Apple computer. I’m very impressed with the build quality. I don’t have one complaint about it.Later, I will post information such as benchmarks, etc. With this post will come a more indepth review of the laptop.
I used to only use Arch Linux on an old, dusty 1.6 Ghz Intel P4. I mainly used SSH to get what I needed done on it, and occasionally used VNC into the machine. But yesterday, I decided I would install arch linux on my current main machine so I could try out Compiz-Fusion. This computer is higher spec’d then the other one. I was running Windows XP on this computer, and just wanted to dual boot. I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I defragged the hard drive in windows then booted up the gParted live CD resize the partition to make room for Arch. That went fine and dandy. I then installed Arch on that partition, set up grub. I rebooted the machine after the install, took out the CD, grub loaded but… Windows disappeared!
I probably could have somehow fixed that, but it was late at night and I really didn’t even know what I was thinking. Anyways. I reinstalled Arch again after that to use up the whole hard drive. I installed gnome, compiz, and everything else I wanted and got going. I actually didn’t really mind much the new environment. I liked it better than windows, but I was mad that I lost all of my files that were on windows. I would reinstall windows to get all my compatible applications back like photoshop (I did the little artwork at the top of this post in GIMP…YUCK)., but that would take to long considering I am still expecting to buy a MacBook Pro the minute they are released. And most people are betting on a release either tomorrow or the 26th.
So I’m going to live with Linux 24/7 for a little bit I guess. I’ve been learning and doing a lot of C++ during my stay as I don’t have much else to do. I don’t like how it is such a task to set stuff up though. I can’t get my ip6000D printer working, or my Linksys WMP54GS wireless adapter (So, I’m wired right now). The sound is also sort of glitchy… it can only play from one source at a time. I can’t watch a youtube video and hear my Pidgin messages come in for instance. Other then that, I can’t really complain though. I am excited to move to Mac OS, but I’ll still have this computer running Arch afterwards. Linux is boring though, there is nothing to play and nothing to do. Even internet browsing feels diferent with. Everything looks smoother.
Posted 9 months, 1 week ago at 9:00 pm. 0 comments
I have been really busy the last few days with server switching, other projects, and…. Django? Django is a Python web framework I have been learning about. I have never coded python in my life, and Django was still easy to use while learning python simultaneously. Django is particularly useful for database powered sites.
Basically it is a 3 step process to making a Django app.
1. Create the database structure in models.py
2. Select the data to be sent to the templating system for each page in views.py
3. Make the HTML templates and insert tags for each variable
Theres more to it than that, but thats the jist of it. It makes programing websites a lot easier and not to mention faster than php or ruby. Django for example can automatically make an administrative page for the site based on the database fields you specified in the models.py for each app.
Django is also highly plug-able. You can drop someone elses app into your own project (which is pretty much a package of apps making up a site) and integrate it in. Although Django is a little harder for the average joe to set up than say, just sticking to PHP, it is worth it. As a note, for production sites, it is recommended to keep media and python on diferent servers. This makes it hard to use Django on a shared server not only because most shared servers don’t provide it, but because it is recomended to keep the Django on an apache server running mod_python and the media (images, js, css) on a server such as nginx or lighttpd.
If you are interested in making a database driven site and are comfortable messing around with python, Django is definitely worth a shot.
Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:38 pm. 3 comments
Digg This!
On the morning of Feb 3. I was featured on the front page of digg.com. This caused my site to get an huge amount of traffic compared to what I was used to. About 60,000 unique visitors came to my site in 24 hours. It took down my home server right away. I quickly transferred to hostnine. It worked for a little while. But then, the site got really slow again. So I added an ‘index.html’ file to over-ride the index.php file from wordpress to try and keep the site up. I just copied and pasted the popular post into the html file. This saved the site. At the end of the day, after the superbowl, I put up the regular site again as traffic had died down to around 4,500 visits/hr. It worked perfect… until 3:30PM the next day. I go to my site to see how things are coming and I see “Site Suspended.” Furious, I tried to get in contact with hostnine. Their phones went un-answered, the live support answered after over 1 hour in a queue which kept notifying me I was the first in line. When someone finally did answer, I stated my problem and he went un-responsive. I emailed all the listed on their site, and in the mean time, since I had a reseller account I changed the suspended page to the text contents of the post. This way it atleast displayed the content people were coming from minus the images. Josh got back to me by email and said he personally suspended the account because it was too busy. At this point I used only 3Gb bandwidth and the site was on this server for over 24 hours. Now this account was allowed 150Gb bandwidth. If you do the math, if the 3Gb bandwidth a day kept up… which it wouldn’t… for a whole 30 day month, the total bandwidth for the month would be 90Gb. This is not to mention that it was 3Gb per about 30 hours and not per 24 hours. I was furious. I emailed Josh back and told him my side of the story. I told him to un-suspend me or I’m canceling.
Sorry, that’s not going to happen, your site used more than the allowed 5% combined CPU and RAM which is clearly stated in the terms and conditions you agreed to when you signed up.
So, be my guest.
Let us know if you need anything further, we’ll be happy to help!
Thank you for choosing HostNine!
Best Regards,
Joshua Brown
Level 2 Technical Support
Abuse/Billing Manager
I never read that anywhere so I asked where in the TOS it said that. He linked me to the TOS and quoted it. It did say that. I looked up the google cache of their TOS. Whoa, whoa, whoa… On January 28, 2008, when the paged was cache it said nothing about any 5%. Keep in mind that I was hosting under a reseller account which was actually signed up a while back.
Contrasting with the current TOS. So it appears they changed their TOS after they suspended me because they realized they didn’t have a legit reason to suspend the account even though I was slowing down their over-crowded server. I emailed Josh back about this, and he hasn’t mailed be back since. I guess he knows he just got owned.
Now however I have the site all back up and ready to go. I thank everyone who is blogging about my recent $350 mac article and I encourage you to digg this article for two reasons:
Now, clearly, I didn’t put too much time making this look good. I just placed video and text. However, the point of this tutorial wasn’t to make as good a signature as I could, but to show how to incorporate video.It is hard though. I only had 60 video frames, and it came out to 200 and some odd kb. I hope this was informative and you learned how to add video to a photosohp document!
