Today, I received two updates in my inbox. The first came from Animoto. The second was from TechSmith.

Animoto

Animoto has updated it’s great service by adding two important features (well, one is important to me; the other is only important to those with iPhones). First, they’ve added what they call “Image Pacing“. Basically, now you can choose how quickly or slowly your images transition to each other in a full-length video. The other update from Animoto is that they’ve released an iPhone app, allowing iPhone users to create Animoto shows on the go. This is what Animoto had to say about it:

“Just snap photos and use the app to turn them into vids right there on your phone.”

TechSmith

TechSmith also unveiled Jing Pro. Jing is the free desktop capture application from TechSmith. Jing Pro is available for about $15/year (who knows why they went with the annual pricing structure rather than a simple one-time licensing fee), and allows you to record higher-quality, more compressed video. It also allows you to publish videos directly to YouTube.

Of course, as with any self-respecting licensing fee, when you upgrade to Pro, you can de-brand all of the videos you produce with Jing (remove all of the Jing logos and watermarks from your videos).

You’ve conducted the interviews – enlightening weren’t they? It’s now time to put all that information that’s in your head down on paper, and pull it all together into a complete picture.

This article follows on from our previous article which gave tips on how to conduct the interviews themselves. Here we give you some possible techniques to use whilst analysing your interviews, helping mould your results into something tangible.

Form your findings into a narration

After interviews you’ll find that you’ve lots of interesting thoughts and ideas bouncing around your head, but probably in no clear structure. The results will be much easier to understand and convey to others if they are ordered into a clear narration.

Apparently, as a result of the leap year coming to an end, every 30 gig Zune on the planet suffered a serious issue – they were basically bricked on Jan. 1, 2009. The problem has unofficially been dubbed “Z2K9″.

From a Dummy’s Perspective

Admittedly, I know very little about all of the technical aspects of new televisions or high-definition television (HDTV), but I did a good bit of research while trying to decide which television to buy. Hopefully this guide will help some other people with as little technical knowledge about new televisions as I have.

This Christmas finally brought me into the 21st century. I received/purchased three items for Christmas that brought me much closer to where most people have been for a few years.

Several popular websites have let their homepages be customised by users. New web technologies have made it possible to add slicker customisation interfaces so more sites are allowing users to customise their pages. But, should you do the same? Will it make your website better for users or will it make it unnecessarily complicated? Will users even want this feature on your site?

Types of customisation

Currently websites offer a variety of customisation methods, allowing users to:

I’m sure that, by now, you’ve all seen commercials for the new Seagate FreeAgent Go drives. These things look seriously cool. The drives themselves are about the size of an older style Palm Pilot or Sony Clio (probably about 3.5″ x 5″ x .5″) and are available in sizes up to 500 gigabytes. Right now, Seagate is offering certain colors of the 500 gig Go drive for $149.99.

I have a 750 gigabyte Seagate external drive on my desk for backing up all of my files on a regular basis, but it’s at lesat four to five times the size of these new Go drives. I can only imagine how nice it would be to be able to back up most of my files (I have 550 gigs of internal hard drive space on my computer) on a drive small enough to fit in my pocket.

I continue to be amazed at the way technology is evolving, and the fact that storage devices are getting smaller and smaller while offering more and more capacity.

The only problem I can see coming from all of these developments is the fact that we are probably all running out of USB ports on our computers. If they keep developing all of these devices the way they are, our PCs are going to require power supplies as large as old television sets, just to power all of our USB devices. Sure, you can pick up an extra USB hub, but if your power supply isn’t prepared to run all of those extra devices, you’re kind of out of luck.

In the spirit of the holidays, here are some fun items to play with while you’re waiting for Santa to drop in.

1) OfficeMax and JibJab have teamed up to offer you the “ElfYourself” application. ElfYourself is similar to Gizmoz, but a little less intuitive (it doesn’t really analyze the photo, nor does it turn it into a 3-D image) and a little more fun. You simply upload your photo and, after a few steps, ElfYourself turns it into a funny, holiday-themed video.

With ElfYourself, you can actually add up to five different photographs, so you can add your friends and/or family to the fun.

JibJab is also offering some fun sendable Christmas e-cards on its main site.

2) In addition to JibJab, Gizmoz is offering some special backgrounds and decorations for their standard characters. You can pop on over there and add your face to “The Christmas Boogie”.

About two weeks ago, the WordPress team released version 2.7 “Coltrane.” The administration area has been completely revamped. The dashboard in the admin panel puts a lot more at your fingertips, and the navigation menu in the admin panel makes a lot more sense, now.

Another great feature, which I’m testing right now, is the “QuickPress.” “QuickPress” allows you to quickly and easily post a blog item directly from the admin dashboard.

Another nice new feature in 2.7 is the plugin manager. You can now search and install plugins directly from within the admin area. If you can’t find the plugin you want by searching from the admin panel, you can also download the ZIP file from the WordPress Web site and use the admin interface to upload the ZIP file and automatically install the extension.

Check it out at http://www.wordpress.org/

As CSS becomes more and more popular and Web designers are using it more and more to develop the look of their Web sites, browsers are causing more and more problems when trying to print Web pages. CSS styles do not always translate nicely when printed. Some browsers actually freeze or crash when using specific CSS style definitions.