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I've never heard this. Show me a Twitter account posting the same thing 3 times a day.

Guy Kawasaki: See pro tip #8.

I even repeat my tweets three times, eight hours apart, because this triples the amount of click-throughs. A few people will complain, but if you aren't pissing off some people on social media, you're not using it right.

https://www.lynda.com/articles/guy-kawasaki-10-tips-social-media-post

Cross development mobile development platform. Use C# on Android/IOS.

https://www.lynda.com/Developm...

Java - Many Libraries To Leverage - Strong String Support - Can be compiled to Javascript (GWT) - Strong Community ... Where I work we recently have begun transitioning from PHP/Etc to Java/GWT for both web-based (GWT) and non web-based (CLI) utilties and sundries that we use "to get it done". We have found that we spend more time creating code that works and alot less time debugging type issue, undelcared variable issues, etc and the performance gain over PHP was also a nice improvement. An additional benefit is if you add GWT to the mix you get Java->Javascript compilation combined with simplified AJAX/RPC for any thing web-based you are needing to create. The Apache Commons, XOM, JSOUP, and other 3rd party packages greatly simply stuff like XHTML processing, data extraction, format conversions, looping through files, and directories, reading files line by line, etc. And for some of our more heavy data stream processing type stuff, the built in threading stuff can give a definate peformance benefit when designed for. While it is a compiled language, the development cycle for basic "get it done" stuff is extremely rapid because the applications we are creating are not large and the language is alot more flexible than basic Bash scripting, etc. Eclipse also goes along with with automatic code completion, etc, in greatly speeding things up. The core 'Java' syntax is similar enough to core 'C' syntax that you can spend your time actually learning the higher level stuff and alot less time learning where different punctuations go. A good a quick introduction to the language would be something like: "Linda Java Essential Training" - http://www.lynda.com/Java-tuto... (Not saying this one is better than any other quick introductions...) Whichever language(s) you choose ... best of luck. -Mike

If you want to learn about Web Design and it's associated disciplines, I highly recommend http://www.lynda.com./ It's very affordable, and the videos feature top quality instructions recorded by industry professionals. Check it out!

More structure = paid = lynda.com

More free = various collections = here

Sounds like he's had a stroke? He sounds like Larry Mitchell who made the Cinema4d tutorials.

It truthfully sounds like your IT department is seriously understaffed.

In any, and every, IT job I have worked in, the workload varies from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Sometimes I am so busy, that I work long hours into the night. I have had the occasional night when I do not get home until 10 or 11. I have luckely not been at this job long enough that I have had to work overnight.

However, this does not mean that it is always like this. And what I do is dependant as to what this "down time" is.

I am a PC Desktop tech. My company does not believe in SMS. This means I have to manually go down to install programs on users computers. An install such as Adobe CS3 Design Suite, or Microsoft Office, and installing updates, can easily take an hour. And guess what, I have to babysit the darn thing. The install files set on a server share that can only be accessed by domain administrators and IT personel, so its not like I can walk off. If I lock the comptuer, than the user will come back, and either reboot the computer in the middle of an install or try to unlock the computer, failing to see that its not them thats logged in, and lock the account out. So I am left to babysit these installs. What is common for me during these times is to log into the Outlook Web Portal and get caught up on e-mails. To my surprise, the RSS feeds I have setup in my Outlook also appear in the Web Portal, so its a great time to get caught up reading Slashdot and sorting through the mass other newsstroies in the newsfeeds I subscribe to, so that I can read them later. If someone comes by, it looks like I am working.

But there are also the "True" downtimes. No trouble tickets. No computer role outs. No projects. At this time, first thing I do is check with my fellow PC techs, and see if they need help. After that, I check with the Mac techs, and see if there is anything I can help with (even though we are about 50 / 50 split between the Macs and PCs, we tend to have WAY more Mac tickets than PC tickets). I then check and see if I need to do any documentation (I usually do this as I am doing my project, so I am usually not behind on documentation). If everything is good, then I start doing training. Lynda.com is a great site. If I am good there, or do not feel like training that day, then I may start reading news articles. Sometimes the occasional game of football may break out - usually on Fridays about 3:30ish when most people have left for the weekend. Finding stuff on YouTube has happened from time to time. The helpdesk guys get superboard and they usually are really good at finding webgames. Sometimes I will actually go for a walk and leave the building for a few minutes (there are times you just have to force yourself to get away sometimes). Every now and then, I will start taking a tour of the floors, and just see if anyone has those "little" problems that they are too embarresed to contact the helpdesk about or just do not want to spend the time waiting on hold about.

So why do i know so well about downtime? That is Desktop Support. You can have a day when Microsoft pushes out some update that breaks half the computers in your corporation and you have to run around fixing it (for the type of enviornment we are in, and the type of industry, our users MUST have local admin rights), followed by a day when you suddenly have 12 new users showing up that day and no one bothered to put in a request to IT for computers, all the time trying to get a project done, followed by a day or two of absolutely nothing other than to deliver a power cord to someone. That is how an IT department SHOULD be - you are not there to always be busy, you are there to be a rapid response team. I.T. should be like a fire department - its not how many fires you can put out, its how fast you can respond and how well you put it out. If you are constantly putting out fires, then you do not have enough fire fighters.

No, I don't think a Flash developer will find the switch to Apollo as seemless as Flex developers. But the transition is still doable if you are quite comfortable with ActionScript in your Flash apps. Said differently, if you are more of a Flash coder than a Flash designer, you should be up and running in Apollo fairly quickly. I'm not sure how many Flash developers that previous statement applies to, since any of those Flash coder could have made the switch to Flex months ago. If they didn't make that switch because the they couldn't grok Flex, then they will have a hard time groking Apollo as well.

The developer transition cases as I see them:

If you're a Flex developer comfortable with ActionScript 3
Apollo is just a minor tweak on things, adding a few more classes to the framework. You'll be up and running in minutes, not hours or days.

If you're a Flex developer, but limited to ActionScript 2
The biggest hurdle is the switch from the AS2 framework to the AS3 framework. The Apollo VM can still run AS2 code and does allow AS2 code to bridge into AS3 code and vice versa, but that soon turns into a maintenance hassle. A couple of the developers I spoke with at Adobe said it was really worth the hassle to convert the AS2 code to AS3 first and then recompile for Apollo.

If you're a Flash developer
Get comfy with Flex first, then move to Apollo. http://www.lynda.com/ has great online courses for learning Flex and ActionScript3.

If you're an HTML/CSS/AJAX developer
If you're app runs in Safari, then it very likely will work in an Apollo sandbox as well. The biggest hurdle for these developers will be choosing how to integrate Apollo into their development environment. They could switch over to Flex builder ($$), switch over to Eclipse with Flex&Apollo plugins (free), or just integrate some of the Apollo command line tools into their existing configs.

Wow. Most of the posts on this topic are so far from reality, I'm not sure where to begin. Maybe this comment will be modded up as flame bait or 'Adobe FanBoy', but oh well.

I was at the Apollo pre-release event in San Francisco last Friday night, along with 200 other geeks. Adobe called it ApolloCamp, but there were no wienie roasts or sleeping bags. Adobe put on a fine show, with each attendee receiving a free full version of Flex Builder 2 for either Mac or PC, plus a copy of the Apollo alpha runtime, a free DVD of instructional material from http://www.lynda.com/.

I wrote my first Apollo app at about 12:30 AM Saturday morning, 20 minutes after I got out of the cab returning from the Adobe event. If you're already a Flex developer (and I wasn't), then you're an Apollo developer now too! If you have a web-based app that already runs in Safari, chances are very good it will just run on the Apollo runtime too. Oh, and if you were a web developer, now you're a desktop developer too.

I think Adobe has a winner on their hands, so it will be interesting to look back at this post in a couple of years and see how things go.

Check out the videos of the event at http://video.onflex.org/ to get a more clear idea of what Apollo is and isn't. Yes, Linux support isn't in 1.0, but it is planned. Many of the developers in attendance were asking about Linux. Other platforms being targeted after Linux include mobile devices and game console platforms.

I was in the exact same situation as you, smilingbandit2.
I found the XHTML tutorials sold by lynda.com very helpful. Pausing the video on my PC, to test things out in an editor (I use vim), is an excellent learning method.
The XHTML course only covers CSS lightly, so I also recommend this video, which is very thorough. CSS makes it easy to change the entire look of your site in just a few lines of code. So it's a very powerful tool in combinations with either HTML or XHTML.
If you're comfortable in a Unix environment, You might want to get an account at freeshell.org. It only costs a buck (to validate yourself) and the basic user account comes with 20Megs of space. Which you can keep for life, I believe.

I was in the exact same situation as you, smilingbandit2.
I found the XHTML tutorials sold by lynda.com very helpful. Pausing the video on my PC, to test things out in an editor (I use vim), is an excellent learning method.
The XHTML course only covers CSS lightly, so I also recommend this video, which is very thorough. CSS makes it easy to change the entire look of your site in just a few lines of code. So it's a very powerful tool in combinations with either HTML or XHTML.
If you're comfortable in a Unix environment, You might want to get an account at freeshell.org. It only costs a buck (to validate yourself) and the basic user account comes with 20Megs of space. Which you can keep for life, I believe.

Try this. I may have misremembered some of the details but it's all in here. I should have put the link on my original post.

Hope it helps :)

is a good starting place for learning about web design. It's free online, and available via dead tree. You can also try the Lynda books.

Graphic artists use Macs because the gamma on Mac monitors is not as pronounced. Midtones will be more distorted on a PC monitor. The color in the final printed product is more likely to be correct if prepared on a Mac. Lynda Weinman's book Preparing Web Graphics has a good, basic discussion of gamma issues.

Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!

I agree. This poll question is a bit ambiguous. I interpreted it as "What's the minimum browser size your sites are optimized for?" Of course, it could also be taken as "What's the maximum size..." In which case, Lynda.com's answer would not be 1280x1024. Set your resoultion to this and click here. Notice the tile effect that results from not making the background image wide enough. Maybe it's my anal-retentiveness, but it annoys the hell out of me.

One of my first experiences with web building was working with the color safe pallette, trying to understand what colors composed it, and how they looked side by side. Sure, I could probably have programmed a little utility to make all the nice swatches myself, but Lynda had these images on her page:

Color Safe Pallette - By hue

Color Safe Pallette - By Value

It was one of the most helpful tools I have ever had for the net. Now I can easily find a color, it's hex value, and how it contrasts with black or white. -Misch

One of my first experiences with web building was working with the color safe pallette, trying to understand what colors composed it, and how they looked side by side. Sure, I could probably have programmed a little utility to make all the nice swatches myself, but Lynda had these images on her page:

Color Safe Pallette - By hue

Color Safe Pallette - By Value

It was one of the most helpful tools I have ever had for the net. Now I can easily find a color, it's hex value, and how it contrasts with black or white. -Misch

• The layout is resolution-dependent, and the sizes are hard-coded. It will not reflow to adjust to higher resolutions.
• The colors really hurt my eyes.
• Images are used instead of text, without ALT attributes. The same goes for images that link to stuff.
• The page looks like crap in anything besides the two major browsers. Just try it in Netscape 3.x or Opera.

And does the logo remind anyone else of an SUV-driving earth-loving vegetarian snob? :)

--

• The layout is resolution-dependent, and the sizes are hard-coded. It will not reflow to adjust to higher resolutions.
• The colors really hurt my eyes.
• Images are used instead of text, without ALT attributes. The same goes for images that link to stuff.
• The page looks like crap in anything besides the two major browsers. Just try it in Netscape 3.x or Opera.

And does the logo remind anyone else of an SUV-driving earth-loving vegetarian snob? :)

--

I just checked out her webpage and the interview. What I found is a bunch of just bloody awful advice for web designers. For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.

Just off the first two pages I've already seen two really poor commands (suggestions would be a nicer word, but less accurate it seems) to her clueless followers - using tables to control text flow and designing pages for particular screen sizes, both of which are things that anyone that understands html would know better than to do. Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!

tom