Donnie Hoyle has created some very hilarious Photoshop tutorials titled "You suck at Photoshop" that have become rather popular on the net lately. If you haven't seen them you should check out the one below.

Donnie's brand of self-deprecating humor is seriously funny. I have been trying to get better at Photoshop but always get bored stiff about 5 minutes into any tutorial I have started watching. Cheers to Donnie for making some classic training that I could watch for hours.

Some of the humor is a little over the top, and might not be all that work appropriate due to some explicit language, but really, it is very funny.

Labels: eLearning Technology

A while back I wrote a developer center article for Macromedia's Captivate (view it here). The profile pic I had taken of me for the article came out horrible and now I am stuck with that photo attached to the article. This was before I started using cartoon images for my profile pic.

Well, if you have run into the scenario where you need a high quality profile photo and don't want to end up in the same boat I did check out Pixoo.us. Pixoo will enhance your image by using Adobe® Photoshop® software and take your crummy looking profile pic and turn it into a professional looking photo for only $9.90.

Labels: Presenter

Last Wednesday (the 16th) marked my two year anniversary with Articulate and I wanted to take some time and reflect on some of the significant changes that have taken place at Articulate since I have worked here. The company has grown significantly since I began working here and some of changes I had some influence on, others I had next to none, but regardless it has been an exciting 2 years.

Here are the TOP 8 MOST significant changes that have taken place since I started working at Articulate.

Dave's Top 8 changes at Articulate in the past 2 years

1. Articulate has released Articulate Engage. Articulate Engage has enabled thousands of customers to create stunning interactive flash content without the having to know or learn flash. Articulate Engage was the first significant addition to Articulate's product line since Quizmaker.
   
   
2. Articulate has launched Articulate Online. With the goal of allowing users to easily and cost effectively deploy and track e-learning activity without the normal hassle of an Learning Management System has launched with great success. Articulate Online has quickly matured into a great alternative to the traditionally difficult to use, expensive to implement Learning Management Systems.
   
   
3. Articulate has launched the Articulate Forums. With the help of our customers and especially our MVPs the Articulate forums have rapidly become not only a great avenue of getting support, but also for establishing a community for e-Learning developers.
   
   
4. Articulate.com was completely redesigned. Check out the previous design of the site on the internet archive.
   
   
5. Tom Kuhlmann has launched the Rapid E-Learning Blog - now with over 15,000 readers.
   
   
6. Articulate Presenter has released three updates (5.1, 5.2 and 5.3) which includes Engage support, Articulate Online support, and Vista/Office 2k7 support respectively.
   
   
7. Articulate Quizmaker has released two updates (2.1, 2.2)
   
   
8. Mozealous.com has been redesigned 3 times (man I had some ugly initial designs). Check out these initial designs, initial design, cartoon design, and you are looking at the current design.
   

Also note, I am sporting a new avatar. Check out the new South Park Dave with beard. I have been growing a beard since December 31st so I decided it was time to update my avatar to reflect it.

I read Tom's post the other day, The Secret to Creating Your Own PowerPoint Templates for E-Learning, and was inspired to create a couple of PowerPoint templates of my own.

The Simpsons

The first PowerPoint template I created was a template created to look like The Simpson's TV. I was inspired to create this template because I was watching an episode of The Simpsons while reading Tom's blog.

Font used in the template is "Akbar" which is a font that mimics Matt Groening's handwriting. The font is embedded so you should be able to use it in the template provided.

Template probably isn't highly useful unless you are creating training or a presentation on The Simpsons, but it looks cool.

Download The Simpsons template

Note: It appears as though there were issues with using the font contained in this template. To use this font you can download and install the font from here:

Akbar Font

iMac Template

The next template I created was inspired by the new Apple iMacs. After reading Tom's blog I went to the mall to do some shopping and stopped in the Apple store. I was amazed at the new designs of the iMacs. The displays are unbelievable.

Font used in this template is Lucida Grande, which is a common mac font, and it too is embedded in the presentation for your use.

The iMac template also probably is not all that useful for training, unless you are Apple, but if you replace the Apple logo with your logo it could be used for non-Apple related training/presentations.

Download the iMac template

Labels: Presenter

Let me first apologize for the downtime some Articulate Online users experienced yesterday. I realize this was a tremendous inconvenience for everyone effected and I am really sorry this happened.

At about 5:30 AM PST time yesterday I began to receive lots of emails, phone calls, and instant messages that Articulate Online was down. Over the next several hours I was frantically trying to figure out what caused the outage, who was affected, and how long it would take to fix. The problem that occurred caught us completely by surprise, but I wanted to take some time to explain what happened and how we will prevent this from happening in the future.

In case you do not know, I am the Quality Assurance Project Lead for Articulate Online, and it is my responsibility to get things Articulate Online up and running in such events.

So what did happen yesterday?

Early yesterday morning our datacenter brought a new server online that had a conflicting MAC/IP address with our primary Articulate Online IP. This caused traffic that was being routed to us to never make it past the network switch.

We noticed this issue very early in the morning and quickly contacted our datacenter to have the problem resolved. Unfortunately it took our datacenter much longer to identify the problem than we could have imagined, and once it was identified it took them much longer than anticipated to fix the problem.

We have used that datacenter in the past, and in the past have been satisfied with their level of service, but the problems yesterday forced us to lose some confidence in their ability to quickly and effectively handle these issues. I spent several hours on the phone with our datacenter yesterday, and I am truly disappointed it took as long to fix as it did.

So what took so long to fix the problem?

When the issue was originally identified we assumed it would only take about 20 minutes to address the problem and we became increasingly frustrated that it was taking as long as it was. The problem was originally diagnosed by our datacenter as a problem with a network driver on one of our servers, but after updating the driver there was no change. After it was identified that the driver was not at fault it took our datacenter a considerable amount of time to identify the correct issue with the MAC/IP address conflict, and to find the server that caused that issue. After the server was identified and taken offline it took our datacenter even more time to bring back our server back online.

We had contemplated during the downtime switching to our backup systems as well as redirecting any traffic at the DNS level to a status page to inform our customers what was going on. We decided initially against making any changes at the DNS level to reroute any traffic to a status page because DNS changes can often take hours to take effect, so downtime would only be exacerbated by making such a change. We also decided against doing a failover to our mirrored systems because we only thought we were 20 minutes away from the problem being fixed and that it would require a longer period of time to get the mirrored systems running and would have also required some DNS/IP changes that would have taken time.

When it became apparent that the fix was going to take longer than anticipated we did start updating our DNS server to redirect traffic that was going to Articulate Online to a status page that would give updates as to Articulate Online status. However, just as we were beginning to get the status pages up the problem was addressed.

In retrospect, we could have handled this better on our end in regards to failing over to our backup system in a more timely manner. We are working on improving our own internal process to make our resorting to our backup an easier and quicker process.

What is being done to ensure this will not happen again?

Making sure that this does not happen again is a priority for us. We have had several meetings to discuss what can be done to prevent something similar from happening in the future.

Here are the steps that we are going to take over the next month to prevent this from happening again:

1.New datacenter - We are currently working on migrating our existing servers to a datacenter that provides a more reliable infrastructure and support system. Rackspace is a Tier 1 datacenter and is widely recognized as one of the best datacenters. We are committed to migrating to the new datacenter within the next 30 days.

2.Improved communication – We just today created a new site (http://heartbeat.articulate.com/) that will give real time status updates of the health of Articulate Online and our other resources. We have also included a RSS feed for the page so that you can subscribe to it to see any changes to the health of AO.

3.Improved failover process – I just had a couple hour meeting with internal employees of Articulate where we discussed ideas for how we can improve the failover process. In the upcoming weeks we are going to make some changes to our failover process to make it easier and quicker to switch to our backup systems.

Once again, I am really sorry for yesterday, it was really awful for all parties involved. If you have any feedback to give, I would be more than happy to listen, and feel free to post any comments that you may have.

There is also a forum thread where we describe what took place yesterday, and covers this all in less technical detail:
Articulate Online back online. Downtime explained.

-Dave

I posted last month an article (Amazon's MP3 store is better than Apple's) about how 3 of the 4 major record labels now distribute DRM-free music via Amazon's MP3 store. Well, Amazon just announced that they have reached an agreement with Sony BMG to distribute its catalog via there store, which now makes 4 of the 4 major record labels to reach such an agreement.

In July of 2007 iTunes surpassed Amazon to become the 3rd largest distributor of music in terms of sales, but that statistic includes physical CD sales. It will be interesting to see how this changes over the next year now that Amazon offers a bigger catalog for DRM-free music in downloadable MP3 format.

Labels: iPod

Alright all you Articulate Online users. .. Here is the Articulate Online that never was.

This is one of the original, prototype designs for Articulate Online and it was what Articulate Online almost looked like.

This is actually the second design of Articulate Online, the first one was so ugly that it will never see the light of day.

Things that really stick out about this design:

1. Has a real alien feel (alien as in UFO and little green men)
2. Articulate Online logo is really, really small
3. Very dark and drab
4. Bad use of screen real estate

We tried really hard to make the screen width be viewable without horizontal scrolling at desktop resolutions of 800x600 with this design, so this design is really narrow. This is a common mistake of many websites, they design for 800x600 and very few people still run resolutions that small, and the people that do, probably are not going to be buying our software.

We also use a considerable amount of real estate for the notes on the right, when this stuff is likely never going to be read, and adds nothing to the value of the program.

Initially we went with a design approach where each page was dedicated to a different function. The page above was all about access, controlling who could and who couldn't access your content. We had a separate page for inviting users, setting permissions, and another page for collecting guestbook information. It is not apparent in this design how you get to those other features.

Compare the design above, with the design to the left. Notice how clean, and easy this feels?

The colors are much brighter, and don't make you feel as though you are watching an episode of the X-files.

We also consolidated everything you would want to do on a single page. Everything you would want to do with this content is right there. You can quickly and easily run reports, assign permissions, setup the guestbook, and invite users. Everything that you had to do in several busy pages in the old design were put on a single clean page. We fit more in on a single page, but made it a lot easier.

The old design was hard and dark, and the new design is light and "cheery". The initial design was done in February, and the later design was done in summer, maybe that influenced the designers.

It is pretty interesting looking back at this and seeing how the design changed so much.

Labels: Articulate Online