Adobe Captivate wins CODiE Award

The CODiE 2008 awards were announced in San Francisco and Adobe Captivate won Best Corporate Learning Solution in the education category.
I have been working on various e-Learning projects over the last 3-4 yrs using Captivate and this award just shows how far it has come from a simple screen recording utility to the 'best-of-best' e-Learning authoring tool. Not only it is easy to use but turns out it is really popular among the most effective training development tools.

You can go ahead and put your feature requests for the coming versions of Captivate.

Flash Player 10 is out!!

Adobe Flash Player 10 is available for download from Adobe Labs. Code-named Astro, the latest Flash Player is available for MAC, PC and the Linux users.

Following are some of the highly anticipated and requested Features:

• 3D Effects — Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone.
• Custom Filters and Effects — Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
• Advanced Text Layout — Fully supported Bi-Directional Text Support. A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
• Enhanced Drawing API — Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-style properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
• Visual Performance Improvements — Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration.
• Dynamic sound generation — Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object.
• File Reference runtime access — Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server. You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

Oracle University Training at Bangalore

I am in Bangalore these days for a 3 day long (May 11 - May 14) training by Oracle University. I hate to say this but it was a huge disappointment. I had high regards for Oracle University (couple of my friends work there) and thought this would be a great learning experience. Unfortunately, that is exactly what it did NOT turn out to be.
To start off, the training could have easily be over in 1 day flat. It was stretched beyond limits; both the instructor and the training material were designed to discuss and ponder over useless information. The instructor manual was over 300 pages and may I add that it was an absolute waste of human and natural resources. There were topics like "Find and Replace" and "Spell Check" which were discussed at lengths.
The instructor too was a huge disappointment. I think he had never experienced scenario based trainings which is very critical for these kinds of tool based training. He, instead went word by word in the manual and wanted us to behave like "brain dead" students. He was absolutely unwelcoming to the questions and to top it all, inspite of him having worked on the tool for 4 years, he had no clue about a lot of topics like LMS/SCORM implementation. I wonder how they deploy their online trainings at Oracle!!
Lastly, I would like to suggest the Oracle training folks to come to IBM and attend a couple of trainings here. They boast themselves to be the best online training center in the world but they have a long way to go through. I hope they learn fast!!!

MXNA is back!!

It has been some time that I was wondering about MXNA and just now I read this blog post, MXNA is back up as feeds.adobe.com.
Christian Cantrell has all of the information on his blog and background. He has been instrumental in putting it up, upgrading it to CF8, and making sure it’s real quick.
My daily dose of blog reading was incomplete without MXNA, glad to see it back!!

Blog template change!!

Like it, love it, hate it...lemme know ur thoughts.