Spondicious Photography and Illustration

3rd part of a series of 3 video tutorials showing how to make a banner or photo slide show in Hype the Mac HTML 5 Editor. Making my own transitions and using Pixelmator to get the photos ready for the slide show.
You can use Hype for Mac to make full web html5 pages or to make element to animate in other web pages.
HTML 5 is the way forward so it will be interesting to see how it all goes and in the mean time we can create some great looking HTML 5 Web Pages using Hype.

Making my own transitions in Hype with photos I imported in from Pixelmator. I have the html 5 element nearly finished off and finding that Hype is actually pretty good.

I used Motion to make the intro and used FinalCut Pro X for the editing of the video captured with ScreenFlow. Using my Mac is great an I am tempted to get another 8GB of 4GB of memory to put in it to make it even speedier when I am working on video.

We are all going to be moving over to HTML 5 and seeing as Adobe are discontinuing the development of mobile flash there will be even more push towards editing webpages with a good HTML 5 editor. Some ex-employees of Apple have produced a really good HTML 5 editor called Hype. It has a good clean interface and is in some ways like working with something like Motion where you have a canvas and a timeline, except it is for a webpage.

It is very easy to you is the software to create some interactive and imaginative HTML 5 websites. A couple of clicks to add text, images, video and buttons. Lots of difference settings that you can change to customise the experience for your website viewers. You have the ability to create a number of timelines and you can connect your buttons to a timeline. You also have scenes on which you can place separate elements and with a click on one of your buttons you can have a fancy transition from one scene to the next.

Read a full review of this excellent piece of software and also watch the video that is included on the webpage. Also within the page you will find links to some HTML 5 demo pages to see some simple, quick and easy HTML 5 stuff. The application Hype is available on the Mac App Store and I am pleased to have bought it.

As a podcaster Amadeus pro is an excellent piece of software to use for creating podcasts. In the latest upgrade to Amadeus pro to version 2 it has gained some excellent new features and made it even more a joy to use. I like that I can now use it to edit audio in video files and it works even better for applying audio unit sound effect filters. Now when I change the volume within a track I see is reflected in the graphic of the sound wave file. Amadeus pro is a very accomplished audio editing software for the Mac and it gets the thumbs up from Mac 20 Q.

Creating HTML 5 magazines and webpages is easy using applications such as Motion Composer all the application for the Mac called Hype. Even though the Apple haters that don’t know what they’re talking about complain that there is no flash on the iPad, Flash is not necessary. I have been using my iPad for over a year and never needed iPad 2 Flash support.

Motion Composer I think is a bit weird because it still perpetuates the use of Flash and drops back to HTML 5 if Flash is not available in the web browser. It would be far better if it did it the other way around with HTML 5 first and Flash if absolutely necessary. The other application for creating animated HTML 5 webpages and iPad applications is Hype and is HTML 5 for all the way.

Have a look at the HTML 5 application which is the book by Al Gore called ‘Our Choice’ and also the HTML 5 web magazine called ‘Aside’. You will see that Flash is totally unnecessary and will be completely amazed by the infographics, animations and the inclusion of other audio and video.

There are apps like Pixelmator which are great for photo editing and all sorts of art work but to use something dedicated to a task can often be the best way forward. To this end with making a logo I reckon that Art Text 2 id marvellous and the best tool for the job.
Very competent software for creating a logo and well worth finding out more about its capabilities.

OS X lion has been getting a bit of a bad press and some Mac users sees as the vista of Mac. Personally, I really like all the new features in Mac OS X Lion. The new features that are available within the operating system are very good and certainly worth having. Why don’t you try learning more about Mac OS X Lion with these videos, screencasts by Don McAllister from Liverpool. Don goes into great detail to explain all of the new features. I would hazard a guess that after watching these videos you would have no more qualms about upgrading to OS X Lion. You can find the link to get these videos in the Mac App Store just search for Don McAllister or SCO tutor for Lion.

I have already been using Mac OS X Lion for a number of months and loving it. Despite the time that I have already spent with OS X Lion I still managed to learn to new things in the first 5 min of watching the video.

There are database applications that you can use it on iOS that our specialist to a specific purpose, such as shopping list, teachers class list, Art database. Personally I think it is a good idea to have one configurable database application that you can use for a whole lot of different purposes. That is why I find with using Bento it is pretty good for synchronising your data between iOS and your Mac. There are other database applications that you could try as alternatives to Bento and I have mentioned a few of them at the end of this article.

There are a few apps that you can use that call themselves photo editing application and all they do is to let you apply weird filters to photos. Instagram would be more filters and sharing the weird photos. I like ArtStudio for editing a photo because I can use layers to be able to do non destructive editing.

It doesn’t matter anymore if you have an iPad 1 with no cameras or the iPad 3 with crappy cameras the ability to edit photos well is important because we have the Photo Stream element of iCloud to give us photos to edit. better to do that on the iPad with the bigger screen than on the small screen of the iPhone.

If you are a podcaster looking for a great microphone to use with your iPad so that you can do podcast recording on the move, you have to look at the iRig microphone. Use it with Vocalive or the iRig recorder and don’t forget that you can also record into Garageband iPad. It is a good microphone that will give you a great recording sound. I have one and I think it is a totally brilliant.

You can add for stomp box effects, there are a lot of effects to choose from. Some are good for podcaster’s although the majority of them are better for the singer. You can either make yourself sound like a dizzy duck, sad mosquito or a fat frog, if you feel so inclined. On the other hand you might just go for some reverb and some chorus and throw in a little bit of pitch fix so that you sound like a pop star.

If you are looking for Final Cut For Windows, I would suggest that you go to the Apple Store buy yourself a new Mac Mini or maybe the iMac and get yourself the Final Cut Pro trial and give it a go for 30 days. I don’t think it will take 30 days for you to find that you really enjoy using Final Cut Pro X and want to keep it.

I have also seen that you can learn how to use this software which is actually quite easy anyway by looking at the Izzy video tutorials. Really good tutorials by Izzy that you can watch for free and give you a really good start for using Final Cut Pro X.

Since iOS 4.3 it has been possible to use a Personal hotspot to tether the iPad to an iPhone. But can you do it or will you be blocked by the phone carrier? Does it have to be wifi or can you use bluetooth?
I have been using a MiFi to give me internet connection on my WiFi only iPad one, but I think I will be looking at a 3G model of the iPad 3 when we know the iPad 3 release date.

Google Docs is very popular for the sharing and collaboration that you can do using the Google service. There are instances where it is better to use Google Docs to work on a particular documents where there are more than one person putting an input into it. For most cases I do prefer to use an actual application and with Google Docs you can use an app called Go Docs for Google Docs and you will find that this will work a whole lot better than trying to access your Google Docs in the Safari browser.

I have also been testing an application called Magical Pad this has a nice feature which allows you to save out your text, lists and OP ML data into Google Docs. In case you don’t know, OP ML is the format mostly used for outlines.