Category Archives: Learning

Learning

Contents
Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.
Talk About Local Unconference to take place in Cardiff
Image Editing 3 : Colour Select with Seashore for Mac
Image Editing lesson 2 : The Clone Tool
Image Editing Lesson 1 : Layers
School Of Everything
Enterprise RSS?

Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.

So this is an experimental blog post feeding the output from a mind map directly via email to the blog. The mind map software is ithoughtsHD as recommended by Ed Dale and MacSparky, and it’s an addition to one I made early in order to accumulate some tasks I needed to do when I get back on my iMac again. So the first one was a kind of to do list, which is against the spirit of action logging I know, but sometimes I need the memory aid in special circumstances.

I’ve had an intense unplanned two weeks or so learning curve with my new iPad 2, and it’s been enlightening and fun on the whole, but occasionally frustrating as well.
In theory there are only about 20-30% of activities which cannot be done easily on the iPad, but in practice they can soon mount up into a bit of a backlog. I’ve tried to avoid getting involved in really complicated workflows which are basically workarounds to make up for the deliberately isolated structure of the IOS apps system.

Other things I haven’t mentioned are native OSX apps such as Market Samurai, or Firefox plugins, which haven’t been ported to iPad yet, if at all.

The iThoughtsHD output to email process includes a number of different formats and here they are:

  • cant do on ipad
  • adding autolinks into wordpress blog posts
  • of course this is a bit like thinks to do on the iMac
  • the difference being here I might try to find ways to do them on the iPad eventually
  • podcasts
    • broadcast with livestream
    • edit sound files in audacity
  • facebook
    • leave groups
    • manage pages on 2nd page
  • Google Reader
    • add subscriptions
    • unsubscribe
  • gmail
    • add filters
  • WordPress
    • edit longer posts
    • add categories after the first few in the list
    • reorganise categories?

    cant do on ipad.itm Download this file

    cant do on ipad.itmz Download this file

    cant do on ipad.opml Download this file

    Cant_do_on_ipad

    cant do on ipad.pdf Download this file

    via posterous

    Posted in Internet, Learning, Mac, Tools | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

    Talk About Local Unconference to take place in Cardiff

    Are you a Local blogger? On April 2nd Cardiff is to host an Unconference event for Talk about Local. Including hyperlocal sites such as Splott Online.

     

     

    Posted in Learning, Politics, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

    Image Editing 3 : Colour Select with Seashore for Mac

    Image Editing Videos

    I’ve been asked if there are any more image editing tutorials after having published image editing lesson 1 layers and image editing lesson 2 the clone tool so here’s lesson 3 which looks at the colour select tool. The use of gradients is also introduced at a beginners level. Seashore free image editing software for Mac is free and open source, it fills a sizeable niche doing much more than iPhoto but being simpler and a lot less expensive than photoshop.

    If you’d like to try this exercise using the same example you may download the picture used below in various sizes from the Flickr photo page.

    imageediting-seashore-pagoda

    Posted in image editing, Learning, Mac | Tagged , , |

    Image Editing lesson 2 : The Clone Tool

    The second video tutorial in this series about image editing concerns the use of the Clone Tool. In the first lesson we looked at image editing with Layers, and again I’m using the Seashore free image editing software for Mac but the same principles apply to many other image editing software packages.

    Image editing with the Clone Tool

    seashoretutorialclonetool-2mp4

    One simple use of the clone toolis to extend some background over part of an image that doesn’t fit in, effectively making some obtrusive feature vanish. The limitations to this are that the background has to be something relatively uniform. If you want to try your hand at editing the photograph used as an example in this tutorial then you will find it here on Flickr with a creative commons license that allows derivatives to be made and published, with attribution.

    thames barrier

    Posted in image editing, Learning, Mac | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

    Image Editing Lesson 1 : Layers

    Seashore image editing Video

    On request I’ve made some Image editing tutorial videos and this is the first in a series of at least five. Lesson one is an introduction to using Layers. Layers are essential to the construction of drawings and can be used in a similar way when building up effects onto photographs. They make it much easier to come back and change or redo image effects later by leaving each stage intact – a process called non-destructive editing. Anyway, here’s the video from youtube, I hope you will bear with me and keep watching, it gets much more useful after a bit of a slow start I know that – and your comments and reviews are very welcome both here and on the youTube page.

    Free image editing software for Mac

    The software I’m using is called Seashore and it’s an open source image editor for Mac using the native Cocoa interface, so it feels like a proper Mac application, not a migrated one.

    seashoreimage

    You can download this free software from Seashore at Sourceforge. If you find that iPhoto doesn’t do all that you want and photoshop is just too big and cumbersome then Seashore could be the image editing application to get you started on acquiring some really useful skills.

    Future image editing Tutorial Videos

    youtube-image-editing-tutorial-1-_-layers

    The next four tutorials will cover:

    • Using the clone tool effectively
    • Selecting colours and applying changes
    • How to photograph a ghost
    • Subtle use of tinting

    If you’d like to receive notice when these are published then you need to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and join the newsletter (see sidebar)

    Posted in image editing, Learning, Mac | Tagged , , , , , |

    School Of Everything

    Last night at Channel 4 in Horseferry Road, London The School of Everything launched. I’d heard about school of everything from various places over the past year, and gathered the idea is to encourage informal learning about subjects that people wish to learn more about, rather than agendas to promote qualifications and assessment. So people with a need to learn can be put in touch with people who have some knowledge or skills to share, so it’s a matching service.

    The School of everything

    explore school of everything

    Upon arrival at the school of everything homepage, you are greeted with the simple slogan in large bold type “Learn more”

    and then you get the chance to either sign up as a person, or as a teacher.

    Within the UK, this might provide a vibrant alternative for all sorts of learning which are no longer covered by the run down local authorities’ adult education sectors. The school of everything also has ambitions to become a well populated international website on the global startups scene.

    Posted in Learning | Tagged , , |

    Enterprise RSS?

    I’ve clearly got a lot to learn about Enterprise 2.o.  For example, what exactly is the point of standardising on one mandated brand of RSS reader software for every employee in an organisation?

    In my understanding an RSS reader is a personal productivity tool, a way of organising the way a person works with their chosen reading matter. But people do not all consume information in the same way. Some like to organise everything into neat folders, others prefer to have everything in one big pile with the latest at the top. Some like to quickly scan through everything and then deal with the most important first, others prefer to work through their incoming notifications one at a time. You get the picture. There are also preferences for the style of presentation, because some people have different eyesight capabilities. For different folk, certain styles and coloured fonts work better than others or they need specific colour backgrounds to work from. Some like three panes visible at once, others a single paned window. Some work with one highly customised computer, others need to be able to log in from anywhere on a variety of machines.

    So I can’t work out yet what would really be the problem facing an Enterprise IT department if people were allowed to choose for themselves which RSS reader they prefer to use. What are the benefits of standardisation, and to whom?

    Posted in Internet, Learning, Tools, web2.0 | Tagged , , , |

    Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Learning on the DARnet Blog