OJAI, California, September 29, 2005 — lynda.com announced that it is now shipping five new video-based tutorials covering Macromedia’s Studio 8 release.

lynda.com has published seven new video-based training titles to its Online Training Library™. Five of these titles are available in the lynda.com store on CD-ROM, and are shipping now. You must be a lynda.com subscriber to view the other two Macromedia tutorials. All seven will help Web designers and developers master the new features of Studio 8.

lynda.com’s new training titles available for purchase are:

Dreamweaver 8 Essential Training
with Garrick Chow
Available now for $149.95
This course begins by covering basic Web authoring skills and progresses to demonstrate advanced topics like using Dreamweaver 8’s new unified CSS style panel. This tutorial gives viewers all the tools they need to publish an entire site on the Web, and includes exercise files to make following along easy.

Flash Professional 8 Essential Training
with Shane Rebenschied
Available now for $149.95
This course covers the animation processes, and describes how to integrate type, graphics, audio, and video. Nearly twelve hours of training plus exercise files enable even first-time users to create and design rich and robust Flash projects.

Fireworks 8 Essential Training
with Abigail Rudner
Available now for $149.95
This training begins with an overview of the Fireworks 8 interface, then covers techniques such as working with vector tools, manipulating bitmap images, image optimization and exporting methods, as well as how to integrate with Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8. Exercise files accompany the eleven hours of training videos.

Contribute 3 Essential Training
with Tom Negrino
Available now for $149.95
This tutorial covers the ways in which Contribute allows less-technical people to edit a website without the possibility of accidentally “breaking” it, regardless of their level of Web design experience or familiarity with HTML. Negrino includes lessons on how to edit pages, create new pages, make pages based on Dreamweaver templates, add links, images, and tables, and much more.

Studio 8 Web Workflow
with Abigail Rudner
Available now for $149.95
In this training, Rudner shows how the individual products in Macromedia Studio 8 can be effectively used together, and demonstrates how to work faster by employing real-life projects and scenarios with an emphasis on creative possibilities. Exercise files accompany the training videos.

Dreamweaver 8 New Features and Flash Professional 8 New Features are both available online, exclusively for subscribers to lynda.com’s Online Training Library™.

Subscriptions to the lynda.com Online Training Library™ start at just $25 per month, and provide online access to over 9,000 video tutorials, as well as more than 140 other titles covering a wide range of software, technologies, and techniques. To watch free samples of the new Macromedia Studio 8 tutorials and for more detailed product information, please visit:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modListing.asp?vid=69&h=1


ABOUT LYNDA.COM

Learning @ Your Own Pace®. lynda.com is an award-winning provider of educational materials, including Hands-On Training™ instructional books, video-based training on CD and DVD, self-paced online learning, and events for designers, developers, instructors, students, and hobbyists. Since 1997, lynda.com has been helping people learn fundamental design principles along with the latest software, technologies, and techniques to communicate more effectively in print, on the Web, and through motion graphics.

The lynda.com Online Training Library™ features over one thousand hours of professionally produced video tutorials covering software and topics related to print and Web design, Web development, typography, audio, video, motion graphics, digital photography, 3D, operating systems, and much more. We deliver unbiased training for all the software tools you use from Adobe, Alias, Apple, Corel, Macromedia, Microsoft, and others.

Copyright 2005 lynda.com, Inc. All rights reserved. Macromedia, Macromedia Contribute, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, and Macromedia Fireworks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Macromedia, Inc., which may be registered in the United States and internationally. Other product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE: lynda.com, Inc.

For more information on these and other available training titles, please visit www.lynda.com or call 1-888-335-9632.

First Microsoft, now Marvelous Interactive, next…?

What better way to motivate your dev team to meet its deadline than with a public online countdown timer calibrated to the second? (And of course Flash is the preferred tool for this job!)

It would need some kind of shrubbery (obviously) and some kind of small animal (goes without saying) but the main point is the timer itself: counting down inexorably to the moment when the deadline goes whooshing past and… what? The counter goes negative? The tree dies? The bunny loses an ear? The developers’ bodies appear hanging from its boughs?

We have received many excellent proposals already, but we’re greedy: send us more!

Speaker Proposal Form

If you have technical or philosophical issues with the form, you can also just send a quick email to speaker@flashforwardconference.com with a rundown of your idea and we’ll take it from there.

The deadline is this Friday, September 23, after which we’ll decide which pieces fit together into the event we’re envisioning. So if you already submitted a proposal and haven’t heard back yet, don’t worry, we’re just waiting until all ideas are in. But if you have any followup thoughts or just want to confirm we received it, feel free to email us again.

Have too many ideas? Need help narrowing them down? Here are some tips…

• We’re always glad to see topic proposals that have more of a how-to approach than how-cool-am-I.
• Very technical topics are very welcome; we want to be sure even cutting-edge coders can learn something.
• Likewise, interesting designer-oriented topics are wanted to fill out the experience for the pixel-pushers among us.
• We’ve had frequent requests for more sessions on the subject of Flash in education, so tell us how you’ve integrated Flash in your curriculum.
• Flash being but one tool in the toolbox, tell us about the other tools, and about the workflow/integration issues you’ve devised/overcome.
• You’ve had Flash 8 for a week (or months, if you’re lucky) — and discovered that it has enabled an utterly new approach to the way you work. Share those insights.
• Flash is Everywhere, right? So talk about your expertise in those Elsewhere environments, like phones, PDAs, toys, set-top boxes, kiosks, or fine art installations.
• Surprise us. If you’ve attended any recent Flashforward, you know that not every session has Flash in it. We’ve talked about web standards, creative commons, open source, Processing, AJAX, typography, physical computing, alternative input devices, and much more.

If you have no interest in speaking yourself but would buy a ticket tomorrow if a certain someone were on the roster, tell us who it is and we’ll try to talk them into coming.

Our goal is to ensure that no matter what your skill level or field of particular expertise, you will have something compelling to attend during every hour of the Seattle conference. So if you ever felt their was a gap in your Flashforward experience, this is your chance to help us fill it.

So don’t forget to tell us your ideas this week!

Flash 8 is finished cooking! And the Flash 8 Plugin! And the rest of the Studio too!

Colin Moock gave it an A+!

We give it an… um… well actually we’re still downloading the free 30-day trial. Because unlike every other Flash blog in the world, we somehow missed being on the beta team.* So we have some catching up to do.

But that also means that just as each of those guys posted demos as soon as the Flash 8 beta plugin was released, now the source code is coming online. So we’ll have lots of excellent files to start from.

Enough talk for now; get yourself in that download queue before it slows down, and let us know about any other great sample files, tutorials, or reviews you find!

*We in this case actually means I because the excellent crew at lynda.com mastered Studio 8 months ago, and are on the verge of releasing all the video training you will need to get up to speed… we’ll let you know when you know as soon as the new releases are available.

This has been around a while, but some of you, like us, may not have gotten around to checking it out before now…

N

Not only is “N” an extremely fun and addictive Flash game, there’s a level editor called “Ned” and an archive of user-contributed maps called “NUMA“. (No, not that numa.)

The developers have posted tutorials on some of their techniques including source code, and promise a full public source release soon. So if you’d rather make your own game than play someone else’s, N will still help you get started.

Just don’t look at the high scores page…! Those players have installed a special “slow motion” contextual-menu plugin for Flash. Yeah, that’s it.

Have you built a good level yet? Are you playing a different Flash game today (during lunch…)? Does your game make this one look dull? Tell us about it.