Adobe, recently announced moving their open-source development to Sourceforge. Looks like a desire to speed up their open-source development around the Flash platform. The new portal called Open@Adobe will hold Adobe’s open source projects in coming days.
Adobe recently released eLearning Suite 2 comprising of Captivate 5, Flash Professional CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Acrobat 9 Pro, Presenter 7 (available on Windows only), Soundbooth CS5, Bridge CS5, Device Central CS5 in it. One of the most significant improvements in this version is the availability of Captivate 5 for both Windows and Mac OS platforms previously it was only available for Windows users. (Thankfully, Adobe Apple fight is not affecting everything)
About a year back we realized using AS 3.0 in the custom eLearning development would be essential. A few weeks back I wrote about the reasons for using ActionScript 3.0 [AS 3.0] in Flash based eLearning development. While training our team on AS 3.0 we collated some good tutorials and blogs available freely on the web, and I thought it would be good to share that list. Some of these resources will also help AS 1.0/AS 2.0 developers to quickly migrate to AS 3.0. This list also contains links to tutorials for some popular open source AS 3.0 classes like papervision, box2d and tweener.
Adobe Flash Professional is undoubtedly the most popular tool for custom eLearning development. With the help of its inbuilt programming language ActionScript developers can code interactions, communicate with servers, program animations etc. The latest version of ActionScript- ActionScript 3.0 [AS 3.0] was released in 2006. It has many new APIs and better performance which were not available in the previous versions of ActionScript [AS 1.0 & AS 2.0] and is well backed by a great Flash developer community that has contributed in developing many open source frameworks/classes/APIs.
Sushil Kokate | February 18th, 2010
On Feb 15, 2010, at Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced Adobe AIR for mobile devices, a consistent runtime for standalone applications which is an outcome of Adobe initiated Open-Screen project. As quoted by Adobe, the Open-Screen project has grown to around 70 ecosystem partners world-wide, which means many devices would be made capable of supporting the outcomes of this Adobe initiative. To begin with it will be available on Android in 2010. Adobe also unveiled Flash player 10.1 beta to developers and content providers at the same event.
As social technology growth continues to march on and dynamic learning grows to be the need of the day, it is little surprise that social media has now become an integral part of learning as well.
Various elearning development companies are integrating the popular social media services like Twitter, YouTube etc. right into their courses and LMS. A couple of months back, the Adobe Captivate blog demonstrated a twitter widget that can be integrated within a Captivate Flash output to send a tweet (as questions/suggestions/comments etc.) about the content of a learning module and get answers/opinions from others following the course tag. This is just one example. The options, however, are multifold.
Mozilla’s Firefox is a preferred web browser for many. Since its last major release in June 2009 it has already crossed one billion downloads and to celebrate that Mozilla Foundation has even launched this website http://www.onebillionplusyou.com.
A couple of weeks back we posted about Silverlight posing some (at this time, actually little) competition to Flash. Now we have HTML 5 coming up – this makes the race hotter. Or does it?
Elearning development tools: only Adobe?
Over the last ten years or so, major elearning developers have preferred to use tools like Flash, Authorware and Director from Adobe (earlier Macromedia). The reason was simple– it was an easier way to achieve the multimedia integration needed to deliver engaging content over variety of media (standalone CD based and then transitioning to web based).
Adobe’s CS4 suite is the second major release since Adobe acquired Macromedia. The new Adobe CS4 suite has some new exciting and time-saving features in all its products.
