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Expert Village Houses Many Useful Free Tech Tutorials

Samuel Dean — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:00:44 +0000

The web abounds with free tutorials on applications that I use, but I don’t often have time to spend on complex lessons, which is exactly why I’m finding some of the tutorials at Expert Village useful. The site houses how-to videos that are done in easy-to-digest formats. Expert Village provides how-to content on topics outside the sphere of technology, too, but its tutorials are quite good for commonly used applications. Here are some examples of what you can get out of the site.

It’s free to sign up at Expert Village (though you can view videos without signing up), and the site is search-driven. Do you use Photoshop? It’s one of the more complicated applications around if you really want to get good results. Check out some of the nearly 900 tutorials for Photoshop found here. Via a toolbar, you can sift the tutorials by Most Viewed, Newest and Most Rated. This three-minute video on how to create a slick logo in Photoshop is taught by a professional graphic designer and thoroughly goes through all menu and dialog box choices needed to build a good-looking logo. It gets a thumbs-up from the community rating the videos, but some tutorials get thumbs-down ratings.

Are you a Firefox user? You can find almost 50 useful video tutorials on Expert Village for it, including one on exporting and saving bookmarks and one on finding good extensions for the browser.

Expert Village houses much less content on less popular applications. I couldn’t find any tutorials for a number of open source applications that I use, and I found only a handful of videos on Linux, with none on Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros.

It’s still worth searching Expert Village, though, if you’re looking for sophisticated content on advanced topics. I found good tutorials on web design, HTML and many other topics. Try the site out if you’re looking for short-format video tutorials on applications you use or want to use.

Where do you turn for tech tutorials?

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ScrnShots: Tools for Inspiration

Imran Ali — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:00:34 +0000

As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.

Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites – onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.

These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ – I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context – and in a connected era – is strangely unsociable.

Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.

There’s nothing here that cannot be accomplished by use and adaptation of photo and image sharing services like Flickr. But the emphasis on graphic designers and the materials that inspire them ensure a focus that could become otherwise diffused in a broader-based service. For web workers, the ability to be inspired by the inspirations of others is a powerful feature.

Scrnshots is the first production of Vancouver’s Orange Peel Media. Last Saturday, after playing about with the service for a few hours, I got the chance to pose some questions to cofounders Greg Bell and Derek Kehler…

Do you see services like Flickr missing a huge niche? Can you sneak under the radar and take users/usage from such apps by producing interesting verticals.

Yes. We do see services like Flickr missing a huge niche, but it’s not their fault. It’s not what they set out to accomplish. Derek and I are both avid Flickr users and love it for sharing our photos, but, we don’t want to share our screenshots with our friends and family (our Flickr contacts). They just get annoyed with us. They’re interested in seeing photos of our dogs, not screenshots of the greatest form designs we ever saw.

On the other hand, we all have huge collections of screenshots that are collecting dust on our harddrives and could be a great source of inspiration and conversation for the web community. That’s why we built Scrnshots. It’s a personal itch that we wanted to scratch.

Current design galleries are very one way. There is a group of people who get to decide what screenshots are added to them and then users are not even given tools to discuss the work. We wanted to change the game completely and give everyone the ability to create their own design gallery and share it with the world. We’ve found it extremely refreshing to subscribe to our friends’ RSS feeds on ScrnShots and see what they are posting on a regular basis. It makes for a type of conversation that wasn’t necessarily possible before.

Other than designers, can you see other communities that might find the service useful?

The primary target audience for ScrnShots is the web design community. We do however recognize that the tools we’re building have value to other communities such as blogger, gamers, etc. Really, the community is being built to allow for easy posting and discussion of screenshots. We aren’t too concerned whether they are designers or not.

We don’t claim to have all the answers for where ScrnShots is heading, rather we want to get it out into the public, start building a community and then see where it takes us.

The desktop app looks useful – will you have the capability to grab entire pages in a browser – a la Paparazzi?

Thanks! We’ve been using the app internally for a while and it makes the service so much easier/better to interact with. It becomes second nature to add screenshots to your account. At launch, the app won’t support taking full page screenshots like in Paparazzi. But, we are releasing at the same time a public API which we hope to see some simple tools built for that we just don’t have time to do. Also, we are working on getting a Firefox plugin made which would be able to take full page grabs.

Is the tech scene in Vancouver favorable to entrepreneurs and startups?

The Vancouver tech scene is “growing.” There are quite a few new opportunities that have emerged within the last few months: Bootup Labs and Launch Party being the two that we have been in contact with.

I know for a fact that there are lots of new startups arising from the Vancouver area, however, I’m not too sure whether they’ve had a lot of help getting there. I think the entrepreneurial way of doing things is to just work as hard as you can by yourself; if someone helps out along the way, that’s just a bonus.

Are you thinking about import tools – like grab all my images tagged ‘screenshot’ from Flickr?

This is the reason we’re releasing the public API. We see so many other services on the web that ScrnShots could integrate with as well as all the different desktop screen-capture applications. While we don’t have a formal plan to build the Flickr importer yet, it really would not be that much work once our API is finished.

Can you see some deeper integration with design tools like Photoshop, maybe creating mood boards or an ‘inspire me’ tool?

We are definitely working towards getting deeper integration into the Designer’s workflow. Design shops have expressed interest in creating private areas for their teams to brainstorm and share screenshots with clients to replace traditional mood-boarding techniques. We’ve used ScrnShots to do this and found that is was extremely successful. We are releasing PRO (paid) accounts on June 6 which will include the ability to create private screenshots as well as private groups. So, a design studio could create a private group for a project, then collect screenshots of all the client’s competitors as well as design inspiration for the project. Currently, there are very few tools that let studios do this in a useful way.

Currently invitation-only, Scrnshots launches to the general public today.

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Adobe Launches Adobe Photoshop Express

Jason Harris — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:15:19 +0000

When working on the web, an aggravating task is working with images. There are image manipulation software tools, but most are costly and poorly-implemented. Today, Adobe has released a tool that will ease frustration when it comes to working with, sharing, and storing images.

In a long awaited move, Adobe opened the door for mass use of their Adobe Photoshop Express online tool. This web based tool is a diluted version of the very popular (and expensive) Adobe Photoshop application that is the defacto standard for image manipulation. This “cloud based application” allows users a simple way to enhance, share, and store photos.

After completing the sign-up process, users begin their journey in the MyPhotos gallery of their images. To start, Adobe grants 2GB of online storage for your photos. You can use MyPhotos to upload, rate, organize, and caption your photos. From within MyPhotos, you can easily rotate, email, embed, and download photos. As a very welcome feature, Ssearch is supported as well.

Double clicking on a photo will bring up the editing menu. Users of photo tools will recognize the main features including Crop and Rotate, Auto Correct, Exposure Fix, Red-Eye Removal, and so on. There are even ways to distort the image, apply pop colors, and adjust the hue, for the more advanced photo editors.

It is apparent that Adobe created Photoshop Express with usability as a main focus. The developers built in appealing transitions when interfacing with windows and application features. The application, even through it’s running in Flash, is very responsive and snappy.

Adobe has built relationships with third-parties as well, adding to Photoshop Express’ appeal. Currently the partners include Facebook, Google’s Picasa, and Photobucket. For example, you can open your Facebook photos from within Photoshop Express, edit them, and save them back. Adobe is planning on releasing an API, which will only add more usefulness to the application going forward.

Keep in mind Adobe Photoshop Express requires Adobe Flash 9 to run. Adobe is said to be working on an Adobe AIR application that will allow for Photoshop Express use outside of a browser in multiple operating systems. Currently, Photoshop Express only works with .jpg files, but additional image file format support is in the works along with support for audio and other media.

Adobe’s intent in releasing a free version of the very popular Photoshop is to enable upsell of their traditional products including Photoshop Elements which is currently priced at $99. Additionally, Adobe will charge for premium features and additional storage.

Adobe’s Photoshop Express gives a great impression to potential Photoshop users. It’s ease of use, easy storage capability, and sharing functionality make it a winner in the online photo editor market.

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