rendermouse blog

The saga of Breeze, Articulate & RoboPresenter

eHelp has a new product called RoboPresenter. They have also just been purchased by Macromedia.

Apparently, they bought some of this technology from a company called Articulate, who actually hired some talented friends of mine at an Atlanta company called Wiretree to build the player interface to begin with. This app was a finalist in the FlashForward 2003 festival. Wiretree always does really great work.

I'm not sure what Macromedia will do with RoboPresenter, since it appears to overlap with Breeze functionality. Maybe they'll use it for a new Breeze interface.

If MM does decide to market RoboPresenter, Articulate has plenty of other goodies to offer in the eLearning server tools department that eLearning folks should be sure to check out.

Screenweaver updated

Rubberduck has updated Screenweaver to 3.0.6.5 today. If you're a registered SW user, go get the goodies.

If you're not a Screenweaver user, you should check it out. It is truly the most powerful and complete tool for building Flash-based desktop applications and screensavers.

This new 3.0.6.5 release fixes 2 major bugs:

- They fixed an issue I actually reported just last week(hooray!), where multiple swInterface.init() commands were being inserted into files used in your build. If you re-build often, it's possible that you could have HUNDREDS of copies of this command in your SWF files (I did), slowing everything down when these SWFs are on the screen. This one fix made a HUGE speed improvement in my project. If you have a multiple-swf SW project, and you re-build frequently, you NEED this update.

- They also changed the SW monitor, so that it uses the Flash OCX on your system, instead of embedding an F6 version. That way it's more compatible with the new F7 projects.

I have to give Rubberduck a lot of credit. They are always quick to respond with fixes to critical issues reported on the forums.

Bravo!

A study of multiple-monitor computing

A recent article entitled MULTIPLE MONITOR COMPUTING DEMONSTRATES TANGIBLE BENEFITS FOR CORPORATE WORKFORCE says that people who have multiple monitors on their PC are more productive and generally happier.

I would agree, myself being a dual-monitor user for years. Programming in Flash is SO MUCH better with dual screens. The left side is my stage & timeline, the right side is my code panel & various palettes/inspectors.

Likewise with Photoshop. Keep the drawing on the left screen, put all of my palettes on the right.

With the dropping cost of decent video cards and monitors these days, you should look into it. It really does change the way you work.

Of course, this study was conducted by a monitor manufacturer and a video card manufacturer. That's sort of like a car company releasing a study on how families with 2 or more vehicles are happier than those with "only" 1 car.

:D

Nice car! Not much a website, though.

Check out the new Ford GT. Wow! What a cool car! (I wonder if those seats are actually comfortable.)

The site somes complete with the obligatory Flash intro. I was disappointed that there wasn't a cool Flash site to go with it. To make it even more annoying, sometimes the server can't load the ASP page and fiendishly bumps you to the sitemap, even though the page you want actually exists on the server. If you retry, you'll usually get the page to load. Boo. Hiss. Don't confuse the user just because your server can't perform.