Ally's Blog Blog - 06013961

17th to the 22nd Feb

2008-02-22T07:08:00.000-08:00

Tutorial

In the tutorial today we looked at adding movie clips and audio clips. Yet again we started the lesson with a handout which we had to follow. We then had to download the requires elements off blackboard. I then tackled the exercise.

Lecture

Danial stated the lecture by explaining about the blog results up to Christmas. He passed a sheet around with all the results. I was quite nervous. My coursework has been pretty good.

Once we had this out the way, Danial started by showing us a multimedia palette. He discussed the function and headings of the palette. We then looked at using audio.

He explained that audio was a common feature and that sometimes audio was the only way of conveying certain information. Delivery difficult due to large file size. We also have to work out where will audio events occur. May need to edit the sound files. Testing the audio file to syn properly with other media events.

Production was also a key factor. We need to script and compose the audio file. To make appropriate to the use. We may need to get permission to use the audio clip.

Different Audio Types

Speech
Music
Other Real world (animal sounds)
Synthesized Sounds

Danial explained that we need to keep voice clips short and relevant. Integrate them with other media. He then talked about illocutionary force, accents and age.

At the end of the lesson Danial discussed how sound can be annoying or overused.

Personnel Reflection

Having sat through the lecture and listened to Danial talk about the importance of sound. It has me realised that having sound on an application or video can add dramatic effect to your work. Using audio files in the correct places can correct a totally new environment. When designing my coursework, I am going to put in extra sound effects to give it that added dimension.

http://www.findsounds.com/
http://www.seaworld.org/Animal-info/sound-library/index.htm

11.02.08 to the 15.02.08

2008-02-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

Lecture

We got given our coursework today.Looks good we have to create website to sell dvd and music...

Tutorial
In the tutorial today we looked how to add a database to our homepage. A booklet was given out which we had to follow. Firstly we had to download the required information off blackboard then we were ready to go. We started out by changing the text file into a asp file. This allowed us to edit the information in dreamweaver. It was a database on a pet shop. The table was already filled for us all we had to do was add the price to each animal by adding an extra field. This is all we had time for.

My website is

Reflection

No flection

04-02-08 to the 09-02-08

2008-02-11T04:04:00.000-08:00

Lecture
This weeks lecture Daniel continued to talk about the use of text. He firstly talked about the different text styles. We looked at weights, widths, typeface and different strokes. Daniel went into these different styles in depth and gave examples.

He then told us that we should look our layout when creating text.He discussed some valuable points we must consider when typing text.

- Computer Screen is small
- Too much left is unpleasant
- Put text into scrolling field
- Break text into fields

Danial then told us that different types of text can actually give a completely new meaning.

Text is important in the computer world. As this is the main way a computer informs the user. If the text was not able to read then user may produce errors when inputting key data.

Tutorial

In the tutorial today we looked a creating are on website using CSS templates. These templates we found on the web. We then add these templates into dream weaver. We then followed a sheet which explained what we had to do in today's lecture. We made alteration to the template using some basic html coding.

We added the title and changed the colour and made other small adjustments. Unfortunately i did not have to time to finish the sheet.

I will finish the sheet in my own spare time.

Personnel Reflection

Using templates as a guide gave me a much better understanding on creating a website. The template gave me valuable information when starting a new website. I realised that producing a website of a high standard would take time and patience.

Week 21st - 25th Jan 2008

2008-01-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

Lecture

The lecture this week we looked at mark-up XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These two topics i had never come across in my time with a computer but i had heard of them.

A mark-up language is a set a set of mark-up conventions used together for encoding content. There is a four step process when using mark up.

1. Element identification

2. Mark-up selection

3. Mark-up insertion

4 Mark-up interpretation

Danial then stared to talk about HTML coding (HyperText Mark-up Language). These was necessarily the building blocks to a web page. He discussed the pros and cons of the HTML.

We also looked at CSS toward the end of todays lecture. CSS is used to give the user the ability to edit the colour, fonts, layouts and menus of there designed web page.

Tutorial

Reflection

In this weeks lecture Danial has given me the information that i had been waiting for, the abilty to create and design my own website. Danial discussed the 2 key points when creating a website. Having looked at HTML and CSS i believe that I could with time and coaching create a website for the world to see.

Week 14th - 19th Jan 2008

2008-01-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

Lecture

In the lecture today we looked at different types of file formats. Such as JPEG and GIF. We looked how the two different file formats have various pixel sizes. The same goes for different moniters and screens. 800×600 and 1024×76 are some of the common display resolution. We measure dots per inch (dpi) and pixels per inch (ppi). The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel depends on the number of bits per pixel(bpp).

8 bpp, 28 = 256 colors
16 bpp, 216 = 65536 colors (Thousands)
24 bpp, 224 = 16,777,216 colors (Millions)

JPEG is mainly used for Photographs and GUI is used for Poster Type Image's. Jpeg has a colour depth of 24-bit and Gui has a 8-bit.

Tutorial

In the tutorial we used photoshop. We had photo shop images to download off blackboard and had to arrange them and edit them in photoshop. We had a final image and had to resemble that imagine as best we could. We edit the pictures in various ways like using the magic wand and picture effects.

Personnel Reflection

This week i realised that photoshop is a powerful tool in the multimedia industry. The way you can man manipulate images to make them work for you in different ways. I feel that coming to grips with a program like photshop will enhance my learning and achieve the results i want.

07-01-08 to the 11-01-08

2008-01-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

Lecture

Todays lecture was all to do with the introduction to graphics. Multimedia is all to do with communication. Danial then started to to talk about what decisions we would have to make if we were the designers. We need to think multimedia as not just simple text. There was a whole list of decision but these are the main ones i spotted.

- Design decision
- Technical decision
- Client requirements

We then looked at a multimedia palette this was really interesting as it showed which objects were static and which were dynamic.

Danial then started to talk about different graphics such as images and high visual images. We then looked at how we gain these graphics from the real world.

Digital camera
Mobile phone camera
Digital video

we also looked electronically produced graphics to. We then talked about different ways we could use these graphics.

Tutorial

In the tutorial today we started with graphic designing on Photoshop CS3. I was quite excited as i haven't used photoshop since my 6th form days. So i was ready to go. Our research student gave a booklet out with information on todays work. We had to download various images of blackboard and re arrange them and edit them in photoshop to create the image they had in the booklet. I raced through the booklet making sure everything was correct. We then flattened the image. I then saved it various formats. this allowed me to upload it as a web image if i wished to do so..

Reflection

This weeks lecture was a big reality check for me as a been using graphics for lots of years now and never really stood the principle of them. Hearing Danial talk about all the differnt sources and meaning was extremely interesting.

I loved working on photoshop as it really interesting and exciting to try and create new ideas from scratch. Even though we had to follow a set guideline it became a apparate to me that i would never found out half as much i found out today if I was to carry out the task on my own.

03/12 - 7/12

2007-12-12T10:13:00.000-08:00

Lecture

I was not able to attend todays lecture due to my house buddy having a serious car accident that morning. It was lucky to say he survived and is getting back to his usual daily routine.

Tutorial

In todays tutorial we looked at different ways we can target a path in flash. This seemed and sounded difficult to do. Geenen left us a guidelines to follow on blackboard. Geenen's notes are easy and simple to read, Once again i worked through Geenen notes quickly but accurately. Within half an hour i had done the work. I was not happy though, i feel that i could of improved my flash file. Instead of using 2 buttons to starts and stop the program. i took one of the buttons out and added a if statement to the action script. This allowed me to start and stop the file using one button. Thats all i had time for this week.

Personnel Reflection

This week i found that i have learned enough flash to carry out simple tasks with out the help of the staff at the university. The Christmas term is just a week a way, to keep my self occupied i am going to continue my learning of flash through out the holiday. Hopefully Santa will put me a flash book in my stocking.

26/11 to 30/11

2007-12-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

Lecture- Multimedia Design Techniques

First of all Geenen started talking about all the new techniques we have learned in Flash and how we could use these techniques to create a website. She then told us what we would be doing next term. It sounded like we would have to create a website of some sort.

In tutorials we have been creating flash applications. Each week have a new task to challenge. Geenen told us we could publish our Flash Files and put them on our blogs.Guess i will have to dig out my old files.

Today lecture was all about design techniques, there were four main sections to this topic.

Structure Charts
Flow Charts
Wireframes
Story Board

Once again Geenen showed us another amusing clip. But this guy had enough and walked out of the class, The whole lecture hall laughed.

Tutorial - Tweens within Tweens

The tutorial today was pretty hard we had to put a tween inside another tween. Geenen made this look easy on her example. We had to make two words move across the screen. Sounds simple but I was wrong. I gave it my best shot and manage to get the words moving across the screen. My attempt was nearly a bit like geenen example but my words didn't squish up when it hit the side. If i have time i will try and upload the flash file.

Reflection

This week's lecture and tutorial have made me realise how much i enjoy flash and the skills which surround flash. I am defiantly going to take this module next year if i get the chance. Learning Multimedia Design Techniques this week has given me a much better insight in to the way we use flash as a development tool.

Its a bit like programming really. You can not just jump straight right in, you got to do a bit of background work first e.g storyboards. I am not that creative but these techniques i have learned will improve my design work in general.

Story Boards

19/11 to the 24/11Lecture -

2007-11-26T15:18:00.000-08:00

Lecture - Disability

The lecture today we looked at disability and Special education. It was nice to see Geenen take back to the stand to take our last few lectures of the term. Today's lecture hit home a bit as i have a deaf sister and took notice a bit more than what i usually would.

Firstly we looked at the special educational needs and disability act that came into force in 2001(SENDA) also the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA)

Next we talked about disability guidelines and what measure you could take to create a website which could be used by a disable person with easy.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

These are some of the common problems disable people have when accessing a website.

Flash
PDF Files
Javascript

We then watched a film for 20 mins which focus on diable people and how they access the web. Some of the inventions were interesting to say the least. There was one device on there which interacted with computer using voice commands. Dragon Talk....

We then ended the clip watching animator vs animation 2.... which was pretty amusing to say the least.

Tutorial - Flash (Menu)

In the tutorial today we stuck back in to flash. This was great news as i was keen to pick up where we left off. Menu was the main focus of today. These were pretty simple to do, even though we did dip into action script. Action script was simple enough to use. We created 3 frames and moved back and forward between them. To my surprise that's all we had time for. I was sad to go as i was enjoying the tutorial so much.

Personnel Reflection

I realised this week that having a disability does not necessary mean that u have to miss out on the wounder full world of computers and the web. I feel it is our responsibility in today's society to help the need and that everyone should be given and op purity. I know for a fact when i design a website i am going to take the needs of other people into consideration. It chokes me when people don't get the same opportunity as i do. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be blind, deaf or couldn't use a mouse.

So when i design my webpage next year i am going to undertake tests on it. To see whether a disable person can actually use the site.

Personal Reflection 5

2007-11-12T03:40:00.000-08:00

This weeks lecture has been very interesting to say the least. This lecture appealed everyone as most people in there life will design something.

I feel that looking at various ways to evaluate websites is really important. We live in a society where everyone gets a equal and fair opportunity. If websites were not built to any guidelines then some people may not be able to gain the information they wanted. This would be unfair to say the least. I know for fact that if i was not given a fair opportunity i would feel cheated.

Luckily most websites to are accessible to everyone. This is the way it should be. What right does anyone have to stop another from learning.

Talking about multimedia and its applications hasn't been studied before, therefore is very intriguing. The subject is turning out to be very relevant to the course which at the beginning was found to have little relevance; however is becoming more and more within context of use and applications on the course.

The student has found the past lectures and the most recent one to include things which have not been previously studied, so continues to be very interesting. Here is an example of multimedia within an application

Lecture Usabilty Part 2

2007-11-12T03:26:00.000-08:00

Today's lecture really followed off from last weeks lecture. Once again I found it hard to concentrate, perhaps this is because this class is my last for the week. Danial started to talk about how the design of the application is important to make it usable to the user.

He then told us that we should start looking at different things to see in the way they are designed. Everything is designed for a reason. We should look at the good and bad points.

We then looked at jakob Nielsen's usability triangle. jakob Nielsen's. Danial talked about the different headings of the triangle.

Effectiveness - The accuracy and completeness which user achieve specific goals.
Efficiency - Goals in relation to resource.
Satisfaction - Satisfaction when using.

We fianlly looked at different levels of experiance.

Novice
Intermittent
Expert (Power User)

Tutorial Guidlines 06013961

2007-11-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

Today's tutorial, we went over website design guidelines produced and created by Nielsen. Ten Usability Heuristics. The guidelines were easy to read and understand and were easy to apply to a website of our choice. Once again we decide to choose the glamorgan university website. In the lesson we went down the list of guidelines. When reading the guidelines i noticed that certain things had to be in the website. If you missed any of them then the website would not work to its full potential. You cant make a cake without egg's.

It pretty obvious that the glamorgan website was going to be of a high standard because they have millions of hits each day from various user's from foreign to disabled.

Ten Usability Heuristics

Personal Reflection 4

2007-11-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

This week we looked at Accessibility and how it affected people. Accessibility to a website is very important. If the site was not Accessible to the user, whether they are disable or not, then they could not gain the information they required.

I surf the web alot and i know that if i couldn't access websites in the way i did, then i would feel robbed or deprived of that information. When Designing a website, all the designer has to do is follow a few guidelines and then that website is accesable to everyone. Maybe the designer would feel a bit happier knowing that there website reaches out to everyone.

Tutorial Accessibility 06013961

2007-11-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

In the tutorial today we looked at a way of checking the accessibility of a website. We were given this check list where we had to check certain questions against the website. Some of the check list question were:

Did it have a Search Function?
Was the website up to date?
Was there a glossary?

There was two pages full of question. Me and Lewis paired up and tackled most of the question's. We got to about half way. The website we looked at was our very own Glamorgan University website.

At the end of the lesson we discussed what other people thought of the website.

Glamorgan University
Accessibility
Web Accessibilty

Lecture 5 Usability

2007-11-09T06:22:00.000-08:00

Danial Cunliffe was today lecture, he now replaces geenen for 3 weeks. Firstly Danial introduced himself and told us abit about what he was going to talk about for those 3 weeks.

He talked about firstly about the usability of various devices but mainly talked about his car. Which was quite amusing. He told us about how he had 6 gears in his car and how he was use to that, then when he went in his wife's car she only had 5 gears. So when you was racing down the motorway he would try and put his wife's car into the 6Th gear it would make this crunching sound. This was due to the fact he was putting it in to reverse. He later told us he still has to keep buying new gear boxes.

He then showed us this old tv whihc had 4 push buttons. He told the channels which responded to them. Danial then said, "What happens when more channels are added" everyone started to laugh.

We then looked at different contexts of usability and discussed them.

Single Use/Multiple Use
Single User/ Group User
Informing / Teaching / Obtaining
Novice User / Experienced User

That's all we had time for

Personal Reflection 3

2007-11-05T03:45:00.000-08:00

My immediate observations was that different formats best suited different things. Having played around on the internet on the weekend I noticed that when downloading various things and watching various things on the internet there was no real standard format.

Having downloaded a WMA i couldnt play it on my macbook. So i had to download a mp3 converter where i had to convert the WMA to a MP3 file which then could be played on my macbook.

I was quite amazed how many different types of formats there were. I then could see how many different file formats there actually were.

I feel that this is important in the future. This is because certain formats work better than other formats. e.g (Some save memory space)

Shape Tweening 06013961

2007-11-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

In Last weeks tutorial we looked at Animation tween so this week we looking at shape tweening. I find shape tweening more fasinating and more entertaining than animation tween. We firstly had to put a word in the middle of the page. I choose the word "ALEX" we then had to break the word into parts. We had to do this twice so that the word was completly brocken up. Next thing we added a keyframe furthur down the timeline and deleted the word. Then replaced the word with "CALLOW". Just like the first word, we had to break the word into parts. We then played the clip, by magic the word transoformed from ALEX to Callow.

Later on the lesson we added shape hints. This allowed us to control the way the word transformed. You could add as many shape hints as you wanted. We also played around with a single shape and broke that up into 2 shapes.

More next week.....

Multimedia 06013961

2007-11-05T02:55:00.000-08:00

The Lectre today we looked at different types of multimedia. Geenen talked firstly about how multimedia had varous meanings to diffrent people. We then looked at the different types of multimedia.......

Text - ACSII

Hypermedia - Internet, Enclyopedia, Expert Systems etc..

Graphics - TIFF, GiF,TGA, JPEG etc

Sound - WAV, MP3, AAC

Video - MOV, AV, WMV

Geenen then told us about various conversion software. This ment that we could convert an mp3 file to wav file.
http://www.mp3-converter.com/

I always look forward to the end of the lesson as you can count on geenen having some thing funny to show us.. This week once again she did not fail to amuse. She showed us this video clip of animator vs animation. The clip showed a stick man flying around the screen trying to kill the mouse pointer. My stomach was in agony coming out of the lecture hall..

Next week Danial takes over from geenen.....

Personal Reflection 2

2007-10-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

Having looked at HCI in the Lecture I now realise that when designing a user interface certain things must be taken into consideration.

The way the user interacts with the computer could be a key factor in whether user wants to use the computer or not. A poorly designed HCI could deter the user, for example poor navigation on a website could make it difficult for the user to find what there looking for hence may look some where else. I feel overall you need to have a good interaction between the user and computer.

I feel that when designing a user interface that certain requirements need to be completed to make it user friendly

Now that i know the importance of HCI I now look at the world in a different light. Everywhere i look I can see HCI from the train station to a child console, this proves how important it is, beacuse if they wernt user friendly then those things would become useless.

When designing my webpage im going to look at how the user interacts with the page. If the webpage is diffuclt to use and understand. I will then know which problems need resolving.

Human Computer Interface

Animation Tween 06013961

2007-10-26T04:25:00.000-07:00

In today's tutorial we looked at different ways we could use the shape tween function in Adobe Flash. We started off by inserting the word "One" and then changing it to the word "Two", it worked first time to my surprise.

When the word transformed it didn't look very attractive or appealing so what i did was add shape hints to the word "One" and the word "Two". I put them in key positions on the two words. I added about 3 shape hints. This time when i played the clip, it looked more fluid and much more appealing.

We then looked at other ways we could use the shape tween function. Such as breaking up one square into multiple of squares. This made amusing patterns on the screen, each shape you drew created a diferentt pattern.

Thats all we had time for this weeks tutorial.

More next week...

Cool Video

2007-10-25T12:26:00.001-07:00

Lecture 12/10/07 - HCI

2007-10-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

Human-computer interaction

Geneen started off the lecture by telling us that some of my fellow students where having difficult making the word "bounce" squash up when hit the walls of the flash application. All we had to do was add a key frame but instead of the altering the position of the word we just had to alter the width of the word. Then when you clicked play it squashed up the word when it came near the wall making it look like it had bounced off.

The main topic of today's lecture was about HCI. We use HCI in everyday use. The most common ones are windows , mac and gnome. I prefer to use mac and cant wait for the new mac os x leopard to come out in 4 days Apple. HCI stands for the interaction between humans and computers.

We then looked at some different websites to show us different HCI examples.

Poor - Radioqualla
Good - Micheal Kamen

The main aspect of a HCI must have the following....

Colour

Optimise - (Too Much or Too Less)
Contrast
Colour Blindness
Meaning (Different countries have different colour meaning) Click

Text

Size
Font

Icons

Clear
Meaning full

Navigation

Easy to use

Later on in the lesson we looked at this religious website which was mind blowing to say the least. The screen had flashing colours and had things moving around at break neck speed. The font was terrible and could not be read. This was a really poor example of HCI but the whole lecture room at a laugh.

That was really the end of the lesson but Geneen managed to squeeze in a funny youtube clip which she had found.

more next time....

Personal reflection 1

2007-10-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

This week was really the basic look at Flash Developer and what it could do and how it could enhance our learning. My immetidate reaction to flash was amazed and bedazzled. Geneen showed us some little and basics thing we could do in flash. These looked amazing but she then told us that they were easy to do. This put my mind at rest as i thought we would be spending the next yr just learinng the basics.

Geneen then showed us some website and some advanced flash applications. This amazed me even more. So many ideas flashed through my mind to what i could use flash for. I have been thinking about making my own webpage but never really had a clue where to start. Now that flash has been shown to be. I might tackle that challenge sooner rather than later....

Tutorial - Shape Tween

2007-10-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

Today's tutorial we had a student teacher taking us. Well I think that's what you call him. He was from a different country had a funny accent to his voice, I'm not sure which country him came from but he was definitely foreign.

We looked at animation tween, I did this last yr at the university till i sadly dropped out, so i was pretty jemmed up on this topic. It was simple all you had to do was add keyframes to the timeline then move the object you wanted to move then click play. I surpose it is a bit more tricker than that, but that was the main idea.

I also messed around with shape tween which we are doing next week's tutorial. This impressed some of my felllow students.

more next week...

Some Flash Sites I Found

2007-10-16T05:58:00.000-07:00

Toko Plastic
ABC Land
Hugo

Introduction to Flash 06013961

2007-10-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

Lesson started by Geneen showing us how she was going to check the progress of our blogs. She did this by using firefox, Firefox was able to check everyones blogs and see which ones had been updated by using the rss feeds. She then told us what she was looking for in the blogs and what we needed in our blogs to get the marks. The blogs have to completed each week till the easter term. We are all ready on our 3rd week and time just seems to be flying by so easter should just be around the corner.

We then took our first real look at flash. The program we are using is Flash Developer CS3. This is much like Flash Develper 8 but instead of action script 2 it now has the new action script 3. She then showed us how to produce some simple motion and shape tween. This was simple enough to do.

Geneen then opened up this Fish Tank flash document which had been done by someone else. She explained that we could produce layers in flash to make various objects move at the same time. She then played the Flash clip, the fish began to come a live and move about the tank. It was pretty impressive.

We then touched upon the new action script, just explaing that we could but different commands to different things e.g Stop the loop.

At the end of the lessons she showed us the concept behind the timeline. We looked at different adverts and movies.

One of the clips was a old man called Geri who played chess against himself. The short film is really funny to watch and the animation is amazing.
http://www.pixar.com/

Here Are Some Good Music Links

2007-10-12T04:33:00.001-07:00

Music Links

B eatport
Juno
Traxsource

1st Tutorial 06013961

2007-10-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

A year is passed since I was last sitting in this very seat... So here I am again creating this blog about my life at Glamorgan University.... Well ive been here two weeks now and started to settle down a bit.. I live in Cardiff with 3 of my friends Liam Chris and Spackman....We have been out dropping bombs on the dance floors nearly every opportunity that has a risen... You could say I lead an eventful life... so I will have lots of stories to tell...

Last night we met some lady friends which had been on our holiday from this year(Ibiza). We then drunk and danced the Night away.. We then had the after party back at ours... Unfortunately I had to hit the sack early because I had classes the next day... Which then leads me to this moment in time......

So more next time.....