Simpsonized Dean

I know, it doesn't quite look like Todd, but it's just about as good as I could get with the tools available on the Simpsonize Me site. A nice example of what Flash is capable of producing.



UPDATE: Here is the real photo and then the clip-arty one I created.

Image Labeler

I am on a roll today.

I created this little Flash tool, the Image Labeler, for a training session on Flash. I want instructors to come out of my training session with something useful. Hope this is useful. It is learning tool, so it might not be the absolute best way to set up a component like this, but I think it will show participants fundamental aspects of Flash and actionscript. If they want to learn more, picking this component apart is, I hope, a nice way to learn. If they just want to customize the labeler, that's also very much a possibility.

The Image Labeler is an image hot-spot annotation tool. Roll over the image to see the label associatied with that area of the image. Currently, as many as 50 hot-spots can be added to each screen, but this number is rather arbirtrary. Try out the example linked above to see what I mean.

Spresent

I saw this on one of my favorite vidcasts, geekbrief.tv. Spresent is a web-based presentation tool. I'm sure the world is super-saturated with powerpointesque presentations, I know I have sat through my fair share of terrible bullet screen after bullet screen. So there must be a need for these things, right? One need I would like to see more is pushing students to create presentations with these tools. And that is where something like Spresent might really come in handy. A student can share a presentation and collaborate with other students and when they are all finished, a simple publish button will send whoever an email with the finished product attached. Here is one I created for an introduction to the Flash interface.

There are some drawbacks, but this is still in beta, so with any luck these things will only get better. The most noticeable shortcoming was including images -- you need them uploaded to the web somewhere. They do offer Flickr integration, which seemed great, but for some reason, the interface did not function properly. In the end I had to upload the images to my personal site and link to them there.

I hope they make the powerpoint conversion feature part of the free service. Keep a watch on this one.