http://thedesignspace.net/ My daily explorations, troubleshooting, solutions and discoveries. en-us ellen@thedesignspace.net Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:21:30 -0500 http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000919.html Supporting Informal LearningInformal learning is particularly useful where learners are not novices in a subject area and have some background, but are trying to add skills or need additional support for the details of unfamiliar tasks. Training people to find the information they need when they need it may work as well as training them to remember all the information... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000883.html When XML data is sent back from a web service, it is in the form of a stream: there are no line breaks or indents to make it easier for humans to read. The example below is typical: the entire XML result is one continuous line. This makes it very hard to troubleshoot your application: you need a utility to... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000866.html table.container a img {width:166px;max-height:100px;border:none;} table.container a img {border:none} table.container td {border:1px solid #999} #preview{ position:absolute; border:1px solid #ccc; background:#333;padding:5px;display:none;color:#fff; } #preview img{ width:600px; } Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovič available on http://www.escapemotions.com/. It's remarkably versatile, but a lot of experimentation is necessary to figure out what it is capable of, so I'm posting a... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000801.html If you work with Windows servers, then you have probably gotten used to doing without the many opensource web applications taken for granted outside the enterprise environment. Drupal, WordPress, phpBB, Moodle, etc. were all out of reach. Yes, it was possible to install PHP and mySQL, but it took a level of commitment and dogged troubleshooting persistence that few people... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000770.html If you need to browse source code repositories to get the latest build of some application (e.g. the JW Player), one of the easiest ways is to use the SC Plugin for OS X by Tigris.org. The SCPlugin is a free system extension that allows you to use the Finder's "Connect to Server" command to connect to the repository as... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000765.html Adobe Captivate, Articulate and Adobe Presenter can all add annoying clicking sounds or "pops" between slides when there is narration. These clicks often are associated with either picking up the actual mouse-click used to switch slides, are added in by the application by design, or added in as an audio artifact. The solutions vary depending on the application and cause.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000764.html Ever since I spent some time adding and organizing some new fonts, Firefox has developed the annoying habit of showing repeated alerts that ask: Firefox wants to use the font "__" on the volume _____". This font is not installed. Allow Firefox to use this font? If I click "Don't ask me again for Firefox," it completely ignores it. Really,... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000743.html http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000719.html After upgrading to SnowLeopard a new bug in Mail.app has appeared. About once a week, one or more emails will decide to reproduce themselves hundreds of times in a folder called "Recovered Messages". If that email has a large attachment, it can quickly fill up the limited space allotted to my email account.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000713.html Recently I've been using the Photoshop Filter Gallery filters more than usual, and experienced a few apparent problems, particularly with the grayscale filters. First all the grayscale filters suddenly seemed to stop working. All of them showed nothing but a completely blank screen, no matter what settings were tried.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000677.html An instructional designer came to me with a Captivate issue the other day. She had converted a working version 3 Captivate file to version 4. The converted file no longer calculated scores properly. There was a walk-through tutorial showing how to use a new web application, then a short multiple-choice quiz with 5 questions. The setting "Show Progress" was turned... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000661.html http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000652.html Facebook's privacy settings can be managed in a very detailed manner, but setting them up correctly can be confusing to new members. It is not at all obvious that you have any control over what people see of your personal information.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000623.html If you do a lot of research, like me, you may have a desktop full of PDF's all named with such informative filenames as "c_dat09.pdf." I spent a lot of time futilely trying to organize them along with their notes and citations, so it was a revelation to come across the application Papers.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000621.html I took a chance a few weeks ago and purchased the "MacHeist" bundle, mainly because I wanted the PhoneView application that lets you get at your iPhone images and music directly, and the cost is very low for all those applications. MacHeist III is a bundle of 15 little utilities and applications for the Mac, many of which are surprisingly...