Learning by Video
I was just checking out John Dowdell's Macromedia weblog and saw this link:
New Flash tutorial movies: On Lynda Weinman's site there's a new series of videos for learning Macromedia Flash MX 2004, done by Shane Rebenschied. All the material is available on CD, and there's also a per-month online option. There are a few sample chapters available for free downloading on the site. (Ironically, they're in QuickTime rather than SWF.) If your learning style benefits from having someone walk and talk through the menus then this could be a useful option.
Wow, this is really fantastic! I just checked out the samples of Flash and Dreamweaver, and though they were pretty basic, they were incredibly informative. I was wondering how much it was going to cost to see the rest and surprisingly, to access *all* the tutorials on the site, it's only $25 per month! That's awesome! The content is pretty much limited to design apps like Macromedia and Adobe stuff, but that's exactly what I want to learn right now, so it's pretty great. And all the MX stuff is already online, which is also a bonus.
Yes, I could go to my O'Reilly Safari account and see if there's any books on Fireworks or Dreamweaver, but I'm getting a bit overloaded with books, tutorials, and manuals lately. I mean, especially for things like design stuff or a UI as complex as Flash, seeing and hearing someone go over features step by step is perfect. Instead of hunching over and trying to grok blurry screen shots and pages of text, I can just sit back and learn. Oooh, that rocks.
I *knew* this would be a good solution years ago. I've talked about it before, but my 1999 company I started called Avedia was supposed to do the same sort of thing - both for these sorts of presentations, and capturing live events such as conference sessions as well. There are just times when it's nice to *hear* and *see* someone explain something to you, especially at the beginning.
This reminds me, while I was hunting around for more info on Macromedia's FlashCast service, I ran into this neat application called FlashCast as well from MDM. It's a screen capture program the resulting files are Flash .swf files. I've seen this before from a company called Qarbon which creates "viewlets". Either way it's a neat way to create viewable, decent-sized tutorials.
Neato... I'm goin' sit back and watch some vide and learn a bit more about these tools. Happy Day!
-Russ