I’ve been developing interactive programs for over 20 years (cos I’m an old sod). I started off just as a “course designer” which meant I designed, scripted and project managed the development of what would now be called elearning programmes with someone else programming them. In those days we used an arcane tool called TenCORE (incidentally, I’ve just checked and a later version is still available) to put courses together but I left that to someone else.

In the early to mid 1990s I got into the first versions of Visual Basic and used VB3 extensively for some time. When I moved to Dixons Stores Group to head up Product Training development there, I used Matchware Mediator (still my favourite visual authoring tool) and Multimedia Masterclass (which became Dazzler). When I started my own business in 1999, I moved on to Flash 4 (the first version with ActionScript) and, over the next few years, became a Macromedia/Adobe Director geek, getting deeply into its scripting language Lingo. Believe it or not, I created a desktop publishing app using Director for a major educational publisher!

But, as Flash became more powerful, my attention turned to ActionScript. In 2004/2005 I created a full functional elearning playback engine that enabled non-programmers to create hundreds of hours of interactive training programmes without programming expertise or, indeed, needing to have Flash installed on their computers. In 2009, I created an engine for presenting and evaluating tests in ActionScript 3 for PassYourTheory.org.uk, one of my companies.

In the meantime, I became an expert PHP programmer – a language I absolutely love for its power, straightforwardness and its uncanny ability to simply work as you expect (unlike AS3).

But the landscape has changed. Visits to my sites by mobile devices have increased five fold in the past two years and so my attention is turning to smartphone and tablet development as my next target. Until now, the problem has been that the market is so fragmented. I prefer the Android platform personally and the idea of only developing for iOS was a complete non starter for me. On the other hand, to develop for both meant learning Objective C as well as Java – a major challenge. I find neither language attractive or enjoyable to program in so I looked at the possibility of using Flash Builder (AKA Flex) as a cross-platform alternative. On iOS devices, this would compile down to (as I understand it) native code but I’m hearing that the end result performs poorly and the functionality is limited. On Android, the user would need to have AIR installed which not only forms a barrier but also introduces a noticeable lag on starting the app up. So I took it no further.

The requirement became urgent recently, however, when I realised that one or more apps would be perfect to support PassYourTheory.org.uk given our young audience. An app developer I contacted as part of a PC Pro article I wrote mentioned Corona so I took a look and was instantly hooked.

Corona is an SDK that offers a range of mobile-related APIs as add-ons to the Lua scripting language. Never heard of Lua? Neither had I. It’s a high level language that has a lot in common with BASIC in terms of syntax – it’s certainly much more like Director Lingo than ActionScript 3. In a good way. Personally, I’d prefer a language that’s ECMA compliant so that it would be more instantly familiar but it’s a small price to pay.

It costs $199 per year to develop for one of the two OSes or $349 for both. I chose the Android only option for now as I don’t yet have the Mac required for iOS development. My early impressions are very favourable indeed. It’s an easy language to learn, the community is keen and friendly and, crucially, the end results execute quickly. There’s no appreciable difference between a Corona-created app and Java app on Android – in fact you wouldn’t know unless you’d been told.

I’m currently messing around with connecting to a SQLite database since this is familiar territory for me. I created a comprehensive database class in PHP and I’m porting the relevant functions across. Although Lua doesn’t support objects formally, it’s easy to create the equivalent of classes and use them in an almost identical way to PHP.

For a Flash developer reluctantly moving away from that platform for mobile, Lua and Corona are a breath of fresh air. I’ve long thought that Flex, in particular, has become too complex for individual developers as it tries to muscle in on Java territory. The only downside of any system like this (including AIR) is that you can’t use features unless an API has been written by the SDK developer. Fortunately, Ansca have created a huge set of APIs, far in excess of what’s available for AIR (at least, that’s how it seems to me) so you’re unlikely to hit the barriers unless you’re creating anything very complicated.

So far so good. This blog will feature tips and tutorials as I build my first app but Corona is looking like the solution I’d been looking for.

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What a bloody stupid question but lots of people are asking it. You see, TechCrunch have published a report of a sneak preview of the upcoming, not yet formally announced Amazon Tablet. The report is very plausible and indicates that Amazon is taking a very different approach to the tablet market – some is good, some worrying.

Beginning with the basics, it looks like being:

• 7 inch – a good choice as that makes it just a little bigger than the hugely successful e-ink Kindle 3. This relatively small size means it’s going to be more comfortable to use as an ebook reader than the iPad or any other large tablet. It also suggests that Amazon wants to be sure the form factor doesn’t get in the way of Amazon’s main business – selling books
• Highly customised version of Android – not surprisingly Amazon has taken the core of the Android OS and added extensive user interface customisations on top. What this suggests is that the tablet will have specific functions rather than being a multipurpose device as is the case with most existing tablets. Frankly, Amazon will want to make it as easy as possible to find, buy and use media and books from them. My experience with a Kindle 3 is that this works beautifully – overall much more simple and quicker than using iTunes
• …but an old version - reportedly, Amazon have based their OS on Android 2.x (probably 2.1 or 2.2) and given how customised it is (it’s described as a “fork”), it would seem unlikely that Honeycomb will ever be available on the first generation device
• Amazon App Store – big surprise, the only marketplace will be Amazon’s App Store. This will suit many users given the huge proliferation of Android Apps since it introduces a little welcome quality control
• Wifi only – intially at least. Who cares?
• $250 – massively undercutting the iPad and most other competing tablets. It’s the same strategy as with the existing Kindle – Amazon is expecting to make most of its money from media purchases (I calculated recently that I’ve spent £300 in less than a year with my Kindle)

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The MoviePlus UI coping admirably with a pretty complex project

Serif is a British software company that, for the past umpteen years, has specialised in developing products aimed at the consumer and home business. Their PagePlus desktop publishing programme is used extensively at MakingYourOwnCandles for the production of leaflets and instruction booklets, having replaced Microsoft Publisher in my affections a few years back.

I’d been a long time fan of Adobe’s Premiere Elements video editor but the past few releases have been disappointing. Diabolically slow in use, liable to crash and not supporting the formats I needed – I’d been reduced to using Techsmith’s  Camtasia for general purpose video editing. Now, Camtasia is an excellent tool for creating videos of screen activity or converting Powerpoint slideshows into interactive, narrated videos. It can also be used for basic video editing but I knew my latest video project would stretch it, and me, to breaking point.

I’ve been meaning to create a series of tutorial videos for MakingYourOwnCandles for some time now but I’m simply not prepared to do them in a half-arsed manner. So, I’ve spent time and money experimenting with various setups to get what I want. My experience of video production goes back to the 1990s when I was Product Training Manager for Dixons Stores Group and so commissioned lots of training videos from professional production companies. What struck me back then was that it wasn’t the quality of the video or even the lighting that made the difference between amateur and professional results, it was the quality of the sound.

So, for this project, I recorded the sound through a Hama lapel microphone into a Zoom H2 Handy Recorder. The main camera was a cheapish Sanyo Xacti placed on a tripod with the LCD screen tilted so I could see, vaguely, whether I was in frame. I also wanted a second camera focused on what I was doing on the table so that viewers could see exactly how the candle was made. For this, I chose the Microsoft LifeCam Studio, connected to my laptop which was used as a monitor.

Anyway, the net result of all this was that I would have two video sources and a separate sound source to mix together to make the final video, which I wanted to be in 720p format. This was going to be way beyond Camtasia.

I thought about giving Premiere another go but was put off by the price and poor Amazon reviews. So I loaded up Serif MoviePlus X5 and what a delight it’s been!

The first thing to say is that, like any software, it takes some learning. Fortunately, I’ve used Premiere and Sony Vegas and MoviePlus X5 is superficially similar. I much prefer the Timeline editing mode (though MoviePlus does also include a Storyboard view) especially when working with multiple channels.

MoviePlus happily accepted all my media – the Xacti outputting in MP4 and the Lifecam (surprise) using WMV – both at the required 1280×720 resolution. A minor quibble is that it’s not possible to drag and drop from Explorer directly onto the timeline: the media ends up in the media panel and then has to be dragged into place.

Otherwise, editing was a simple process. It’s important to get the layers right: channels that appear at the top of the screen will also appear above the other channels when the video is created. For example, if you want a logo/watermark, this needs to go on a top layer. Essentially, I create an overlay later for the logo, a video layer for the Lifecam footage, a second video layer for the main footage from the Sanyo and an audio channel for the Zoom’s output.

The biggest issue was synchronising the two video channels together so that I could cut between them and then synchronising the audio. The process is to repeatedly split and move channels until they line up and then use the intuitive opacity control to fade in and out the close-up view provided by the Lifecam.

You can add images (a logo for example) but I couldn’t find a way to resize and reposition them so I ended up creating a 1280×720 image in Fireworks with the logo in the top left corner and a transparent background.

MoviePlus has a good range of transitions but I tend to follow the BBC approach of only using them very sparingly and sticking to simple transitions. Similarly, there’s a range of video effects but I only used the brightness control as I’d mucked up the lighting slightly.

Finally, MoviePlus outputs to just about any format you might want, except (as far as I can tell) Flash FLV which is an odd omission. Most of my blogs use that format and it adds an extra stage if I then have to convert. Having said that, MP4 is becoming increasingly accepted and YouTube output, for example, is seamless (as is iPad and iPhone output).

For me, MoviePlus is a triumph. My only major gripe is that on my quad-core (Q8200 2.33GHz) PC the interface become very sluggish as I piled up the channels and media. On the positive side, MoviePlus does at least use all available cores so the workload is distributed as far as possible. My PC is around 18 months old now and was hardly bleeding edge at the time. I fully accept that editing HD video is going to put a strain on the hardware and I don’t blame MoviePlus for this.

MoviePlus is a well thought out, feature rich video editor that, in my experience, is rock solid. I felt I was tempting fate with all that I threw at it but, whilst it ran pretty slowly as my project became more complex, it didn’t fall over once. At £59.99 (inc VAT) it’s an absolute bargain – by far the best consumer video editor I’ve seen. Now if only it could improve my delivery (which is decidedly Shatner-esque) and remind me to turn the microphone on…

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The recent Apple developer conference was a bit of a damp squib. OSX Lion, yawn. iOS5, meh (was there a single “new” feature that hadn’t been ripped off Android or Windows Mobile?). But iCloud is different.

You see, iCloud was the one announcement that could change things. And Google is also looking to stir things up with the forthcoming launch of the first Chromebooks.

iCloud is a service that enables you to have your music, videos and photos (etc) stored on Apple’s servers so you can access all of it from any iOS device. The Chromebook is, perhaps, what the word “netbook” should have meant if it hadn’t already been hijacked. Essentially, a small laptop running an OS based on Google’s Chrome browser.

Both technologies make use of fast internet connections and the ever declining costs of storage. They make it possible to store much of your data online (in the case of iCloud) or ALL of your data online (in the case of Chromebooks). As such, they share many advantages including synchronisation across devices, making data independent from devices and therefore, in theory at least, safer. Drop your iPad or Chromebook under a bus and, annoying and costly though that would be, your data remains safely stored away on Apple or Google servers.

The chief difference between the two strategies is that whilst Apple is creating a cloud service based around existing devices, Google is creating (or offering licences to create) devices around its existing cloud service.

It’s hard to say which is better. Millions of people own iOS devices (200 million, according to Apple) but the number of Google users is at least as great. When I use my iPad, my biggest frustration is the lack of close integration with my Google account compared to my Android phone. In the end, it probably depends on which services you find most useful.

For business, Google might be onto something. With a Chromebook, I could add, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as using the best email client in the business. All from a device with (probably) longer battery life than a laptop/netbook, that’s easier to use, has none of the complications of a “grown up” operating system and, the jewel in the crown, is (pretty much) “instant on”. I can also, of course, edit those documents on my desktop or laptop PC when I get back into the office.

For leisure, it might be Apple that’s onto something. With iCloud, I can buy an album from the  iTunes store and enjoy it on all my iOS devices. I can take a photo with my iPhone and it’ll be available on the other devices without having to go through iTunes.

Chromebooks represent what might well be an attractive IT option for business. At launch, they’re retailing at around £350 but I’d expect that to drop to nearer £250 as competition ramps up. For that, they make an excellent netbook. Their Achilles Heel is the constant reliance on an internet connection. Quite how much of my Google Docs document I could edit or how much data might be lost if my connection went down I don’t know.

Both technologies are extremely exciting. With a slimline OS, custom apps, instant on and focus on the internet, Chromebooks are closer to tablets than traditional laptops. If the price drops and the technology proves itself, they could be a very convenient way of living within the Googleverse. iCloud ushers in the end of reliance on laptops or desktops to synchronise your iOS device.

I don’t believe either a Chromebook OR an iOS device (even the iPad) would be enough for any but the most undemanding households to have as their only computing device. However, if the price is right (as it is with the iPad, for example), they could add something genuinely different to the mix.

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I love Ubuntu but I’ve had an ongoing problem accessing my existing Buffalo NAS device. I’d been following what seemed to me to be a logical process which was to click Network, at which point I saw the device and then navigate to the folder. As is so often the case, the obvious method is not the correct one.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Find out the IP Address of your NAS device. Usually, you’d do this by bringing your Router’s config screen up (usually achieved by typing http://192.168.0.1 or http://192.168.1.1 into your browser).
2. If your NAS device does not have a fixed IP address (in other words, its IP address is set by the router – this is often the default setting) then you need to type the NAS device’s IP address into your browser to access its control panel and fix the IP address. This way, once the link is set up it won’t change if you turn off the NAS device or router.
3. Fire up a new Nautilus/File Explorer window, select Go/New Location and type smb://[NAS Device’s IP Address . This will bring up a list of the Windows Shares on that device.
4. In Ubuntu, click Places, Connect to Server. Change the Service type to “Windows Share”. Type the IP Address of the NAS device into the “Server” field. Type the name of the Windows share into the “Share” field. If you want to link to a subfolder, type its name into “Folder”.
5. Click the “Add bookmark” checkbox and give the bookmark a name
6. Click Connect and, hopefully, you’ll see an icon appear on your desktop and a new entry under the Places

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I’m in the middle of a process of moving websites across from a dedicated server to a new Virtual Server provided by Memset. It’s been pretty simple so far with the main thorn in my side being problems with WordPress. I can get it installed easily enough but upgrades and plugin installations were failing. Occasionally a small plugin would work but, in the main, I’d get a message telling me that WordPress could not create a particular folder.

These problems are caused by issues with folder permissions. On Linux servers, each folder has separate permissions attached which determine who can do what.

The long and short answer, for me at least, is to recompile PHP with suPHP. What this does is to change PHP from acting as if it is an anonymous user to acting as if it is the owner (you). In other words, if you were able to create a folder in FileZilla, PHP and WordPress would be able to create the folder as part of an installation of upgrade.

IMPORTANT: before you start, back up EVERYTHING including your MySQL databases.

Adding suPHP can be easily achieved through cPanel. Go to Software/EasyApache. Usually, you’d want to select the PHP Encryption and Image Manipulation profile and then click the Start customising based on profile button.

Go through each step. In most cases you will want to pick the latest version of Apache and PHP. Under Short Options List, make sure you pick Mod SuPHP . If you want to add other modules (eg cURL) select Exhaustive Options List, otherwise click Save and Build.

EasyApache will then compile and build Apache and PHP with the options you’ve selected. It takes around 15 minutes and your server is offline at the time so pick a suitable time of day or night if you have any public sites.

At the end, you will be shown the PHP and SuExec Configuration screen. Next to PHP 5 Handler you must pick CGI to enable suPHP. Once you’ve done this and clicked Save New Configuration, go back into WordPress and attempt to update or install a plugin. If suPHP was the problem, your updates and automatic installations will now work perfectly!

Thanks to Martyn at Memset for pointing me in the right direction.

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WordPress is being used increasingly for the development of fully-fledged websites. After all, it offers a powerful combination of being (at least in theory) easy to skin whilst also providing an excellent user interface for managing the site once it’s up and running.

I’ve been developing a business creating WordPress sites using the excellent Thesis theme from DIYThemes.com. Thesis makes it possible to have pretty much any design you like, some of which can be implemented using the WordPress dashboard. To move significantly away from the Thesis default theme, however, you need to use CSS and Thesis makes this easy by making a .custom CSS class available. What this means is that any class based on .custom will override the equivalent class in a design. In practice, this means that if I wanted to have my own <h3> styling, I would simply apply it like this within custom.css:

.custom h3 {
    color:#ff000;
}

I’m sure you can immediately see the power of this: you can change the entire design this way without touching the core Thesis or WordPress CSS. Thesis also includes a wide range of addition Hooks into the WordPress framework but that’s beyond the scope of this article.

The problem is that websites (as opposed to blogs) often need very different layouts across their pages. In WordPress, when you add a Widget, it’s added for every page in the site whether you like it or not. What’s needed is extra flexibility in hiding, showing and editing all aspects of the page. Thesis does add the “no sidebar” template, but that still doesn’t give enough flexibility.

I want to talk about a little known feature that Thesis makes available for WordPress pages. You see, not only can you override css at a global level but also on each individual page. To access this, enter a new, unique, class name in the CSS field within the Page.

Once you’ve done this, you can access CSS properties using (in this case) the .resource class rather than .custom, but still within the custom.css file so it’s all in one place.

Let’s imagine, for example, that I want to hide one of the sidebars on my “Resources” page. Here’s how I’d do it:

1. Load up Firefox and use the Web Developer Toolbar to find out the CSS selector used to display the sidebar
2. Open up custom.css and set this CSS’s display property to “none” like this:

.resource #sidebar_1 {
    display:none;
}

Whilst you can, of course, achieve the same effect by creating a new template for the page, this is a much simpler way to make changes unless you want an entirely new layout.

You can also use the multimedia box in Thesis to add any HTML you like so it’s possible to further customise the page that way. There is a point, however, where all this customisation would be better done with an entirely new template. Once you start feeling as though you’re bodging it- that’s when to start from scratch. If all you want to do is hide or show sidebars or make other unique changes to the design of one page, give this technique a try, it’s a whole lot quicker!

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Scribbleit is a UK based web design and hosting company run by Kevin Partner. Scribbleit develops applications for clients and also develops its own web applications and ecommerce sites. PassYourTheory, MakingYourOwnCandles and MicrobusinessEntrepreneur are all Scribbleit developments.

FixedPriceWebsite.co.uk

Scribbleit has created a Fixed Price Website Service that will allow small business owners and others to have a fully custom designed site built by using WordPress technology and hosted on our space with built-in webmastering services for a fixed development price followed by a low cost monthly hosting and webmastering fee. We’re limiting the number of clients for this service and spaces are filling quickly so if you have a small business and want a new website (whether you have one at present or not), time’s running out!

I’ve been a Contributing Editor of PC Pro Magazine since 1996 and am also the author of How to set up an online business, a complete guide to planning, building and marketing a profitable web business idea: it even includes methods of ensuring that your idea will make money. Order it from Amazon.

Follow Kevin on Twitter at kevpartner for all the latest technology and internet marketing news, and some undisguised grumpiness.

We use BigCommerce, by far and away the best online ecommerce solution we’ve found.

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Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out how much of time time I could spend using Ubuntu. I am not about to abandon Windows 7 entirely as there are too many applications on that platform that I use (including Adobe’s CS5 suite) but I’d realised that I spend most of my time working in a browser these days.

Here’s the best way to do it:

• Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/windows-installer and click Start download. This will download the Wubi installer for Windows.
• If you’re using a 64 bit processor (you almost certainly are) then Wubi will, unfortunately, install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu which the makers of Ubuntu themselves say is not for “daily use”. The problem is that drivers (relatively scare on Linux in the first place) and programs often only exist in the 32 bit version. This happened to me and I was forced to reinstall. To force it to use the 32 bit version, simply download the 32-bit iso image from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download into the same folder as Wubi.
• Run Wubi. You may well get a message about being unable to find drives. This is likely to be because you’ve got a built in media card reader. Simply click Continue time and time again until it goes away and all will be well.
• Reboot. You should see a text menu with your current Windows installation as the default and the new Ubuntu installation. Select Ubuntu and follow the steps through to complete the installation.

You’ll find most of the commonly used applications have already been installed (including OpenOffice) but to add more software go to Applications > Ubuntu Software Centre and do a search. You can find the Flash player and Filezilla there, for example. Google Chrome can be installed from within Firefox. Tweetdeck is slightly more involved but full information can be found by searching their user forum (hint: do not click the Install Now button as it doesn’t work).

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I’ve spent a couple of hours this afternoon solving an irritation. I like to keep an eye on how many Twitter followers I have, not as an obsession of course but just out of interest. Doing so involves going to my Twitter page: www.twitter.com/kevpartner or clicking on my profile in Tweetdeck (having found a recent tweet). What I want is a way to see the number all the time, preferably updating every few minutes.

So I created a simple Windows Sidebar gadget that interacts with the Twitter API using jQuery to retrieve this bit of data (it could retrieve anything, of course) every five minutes and display it in the sidebar.

I’m just going to show you the crucial bit. You’ll need to create a blank Sidebar Gadget using Microsoft’s instructions and make it look however you want. The code would work in exactly the same way if inserted in a web page if you’d prefer.

This bit goes in the  <head>  section. It assumes you have jQuery in a subfolder called js.

<script src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script>

$(document).ready(function(){
getfollowers();

function getfollowers(){
requestURL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/kevpartner.json?callback=?";
$.getJSON(requestURL, callback);
}

function callback(data)
{
var now = new Date();
var theminutes=now.getMinutes();
if(theminutes<10)
{
theminutes="0"+theminutes;
}
var thehours=now.getHours();
var thetime=thehours+":"+theminutes;
$('#time').text("at "+thetime);
$('#gadgetContent').text(data.followers_count+" followers");
setTimeout(getfollowers, 300000);
}
});
</script>
</head>

There are two main functions. getfollowers() calls the Twitter API and asks it to return (in this case) my user data. It uses the getJSON method to do that and, once it gets a response, it calls the second function callback

callback calculates the current time (so I can see when it last updated) and also pulls out the followers_counts JSON element. These bits of information are then inserted in the appropriate span object using standard jQuery notation. The setTimeout function repeats the process every five minutes.

And this is the bit in the body:

<body>
<g:background id="imgBackground">
<span id="gadgetContent"></span>
<span id="time"></span>
</g:background>
</body>

This is very rough and ready with no visual styling at all. But it does the job and does it nicely! I might polish it up into a proper widget which will allow users to insert their own user name. If I do decide to do that, I’ll publish it. Follow me on Twitter to find out when this happens!

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