Bitwise Magazine

How to teach online

welcome to my studio

Tuesday 19 March 2013

I’ve been teaching multimedia courses on Udemy since the late summer of 2011.

I now have five programming courses and over 4,000 students. In the time I've been teaching on Udemy I have learnt a great deal about how to record and produce videos and screencasts, and how to put together a home studio on a budget. If you need to create your own studio - whether for producing tutorials or just for making better-looking YouTube videos - you might like to read Udemy's 'behind the scenes' guide to my home studio. Here it is: https://www.udemy.com/blog/tips-tricks-for-creating-a-home-recording-studio/.

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Portrait Professional 11

Image enhancement software

Friday 8 March 2013

Standard Edition £39.90 (currently on offer at £19.95)
Studio Edition £63.90 (includes Photoshop plugin – offer price £31.95)
Studio 64-bit Edition £105.90 (offer price - £52.95)
Anthropics Technology Ltd.
http://www.portraitprofessional.com
Feature List: http://www.portraitprofessional.com/editions/

Not so long ago, the airbrush in Photoshop might have been considered to be the ultimate tool for touching up portrait photographs. Not any longer! Portrait Professional is an image editing program that not only smooths out the wrinkles but also tans the skin, whitens the teeth and adds a sparkle to the eyes. In short, it can take years off your life in a matter of moments. Here (on a Mac) you see an original photograph on the left and the digitally enhanced version on the right. I began by selecting a set of automatic enhancements – then I changed a few additional parameters in the panels on the right to change the skin tone, whiten the teeth and brighten the eyes. In recent years, photographic enhancement has sometimes become a controversial subject. Every once in a while a (...)

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Vue 11 Infinite

Terrain design and animation

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Vue 11 Infinite $1,295
e-on software
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/

Vue 11 Infinite is the latest release of e-on software's beautiful landscape design application. The core features of this program were established several versions ago and the last few releases might be said to have concentrated on adding refinements to give digital artists more control over their designs and the ability to create still or animated images with even more ‘photo-realism' than hitherto. Vue 11 on Windows – the software comes with a library of ready-to-use objects and plants. Here I am adding a tree by selecting it from the dialog box The last principal versions, Vue 10 and 10.5, provided tools to assist in the creation of more naturally diverse terrains with a greater variety in the form and texturing of rocks or pebbles, a ‘physical water (...)

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JavaScript In Easy Steps

Book review

Wednesday 13 February 2013

JavaScript In Easy Steps (5th edition) $14.99 / £10.99
by : Mike McGrath
ISBN-13: 9781840785708
ISBN-10: 1840785705
http://ineasysteps.com/products-page/programming/javascript-in-easy-steps-5th-edition/

JavaScript is, in principle, a fairly simple and lightweight language. So it's ironic that many of the books about JavaScript are incredibly complicated and heavy. But not this one. JavaScript in Easy Steps is a slim, easy-to-follow book that contains just over 200 pages. As with the other titles in the ‘easy steps' series, this is nicely laid-out book with colour on every page. The code samples are syntax-coloured, the screenshots (admittedly rather few of those) are in colour – the headings, margin ‘hot tips' and even the page edges are all coloured. This not only makes the book look a lot more approachable than your average JavaScript tome; it also makes the material easy to find (each chapter is colour-coded so you can find it using the coloured tabs on the page (...)

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Bitwise Courses Launch!

Learn programming online

Tuesday 5 February 2013

The expansion in online multimedia courses has been an extraordinary phenomenon over the past couple of years. And I am very pleased to have played my own small part in it!

For just over a year, I have been teaching programming courses on the Udemy site. In that time, more than 3,000 people have signed up to my courses on Ruby, Advanced Ruby, Object Pascal, C# and The Business of Programming. Recently I decided that I really needed to provide an online 'hub' for my courses - somewhere where existing students, and prospective new students, would easily be able to keep up to date with developments. So, today, I am launching Bitwise Courses. Bitwise Courses is now the ‘brand name' for all the multimedia programming courses that I have already launched or that we (myself and others) are currently working on. These are the places where you can find the latest information: The Bitwise Courses web site: http://www.bitwisecourses.com/ The Bitwise (...)

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Brilliant Edge Animate

Book review

Tuesday 29 January 2013

Brilliant Edge Animate £18.99
by Steve Johnson
Pearson
ISBN-10: 0273773410
ISBN-13: 978-0273773412

Adobe Edge Animate is a development tool for creating animated web content using HTML (principally HTML5), CSS and JavaScript without having to do any explicit coding. Instead it uses a timeline onto which elements are placed and animated using keyframes. Edge Animate is an attractive and powerful system which is available for Windows or Mac and, best of all, it's free (for the time being, anyway – Adobe says the free license is an introductory offer and the software is “valued at $499” – if you want grab a copy of the software while it's still free, go here: http://html.adobe.com/edge/animate). But while it's a nice piece of software, it is quite complex and undoubtedly there is a fairly steep learning curve. And that is where ‘Brilliant Edge Animate' (...)

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Mac Keyboards – why I bought one when I already have one!

Small, beautiful and frustrating…

Wednesday 23 January 2013

There are some things about the Mac that are beautiful and some things that drive me up the wall. The keyboard falls into both categories. Slim and elegant with a sleek aluminium sheen and low-profile white keys it certainly looks lovely. But in use, it’s a pig.

The damn' thing doesn't even have a Forward-delete key. If you want to delete the character to the right of the cursor, you have to press a key labelled ‘FN' and simultaneously press the Backspace-delete key. Intuitive it ain't. It also lacks other useful keys. For example, the UK keyboard has no has no hash key (#). Pressing Shift-3 produces the pound symbol (£). It took me a while to figure out, and a fair bit of Googling, that you have to press ALT+3 to produce a hash – something that is vital to know if you do much programming. A Tale Of Two Keyboards: my original (above) - small, beautiful and impractical; my new one (below) a bigger, less elegant beast but one that I can live with. There are other keys that are missing too. Missing, that is, if you re used to (...)

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WebPlus X6

Web site design and management software

Tuesday 15 January 2013

WebPlus X6 (£81.69 – inc. VAT)
Serif: http://www.serif.com/webplus/

Serif's WebPlus is the sort of web design application which, in the normal course of events, I would dismiss without a second glance. To someone who is used to tweaking HTML tags, writing custom CSS and hand-coding my pages using JavaScript, a web design tool that hides the code seems positively perverse. However, the prejudices of a lifetime can change in an instant when you are under pressure. And today I was under pressure. I bought a new web domain and I wanted to get a basic web site up and running as fast as I possibly could – preferably before lunch. While it would have been possible, just about, to knock something up in a few hours using Adobe Dreamweaver, the chances are that the end result would be pretty primitive with only very basic layout and styling. So I thought (...)

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Learn C# Special Offer - save $60!

But only until Christmas!

Tuesday 11 December 2012

Learn C# the fastest, simplest way with my in-depth interactive course on Udemy - sign up today and save a massive $60!!!!

Normally $99. But sign up now and you can gain access to my C# programming course for just $39. If you want to get started, just click this link: http://www.udemy.com/learn-c-sharp-... C# is the default language for programming Microsoft .NET. But did you know you can also run it on a Mac under OS X? Here's a short video to explain how. C# programmers are always in demand. If you want to break into the programming business or extend your existing programming knowledge, my C# course will give you a quick and easy way into .MET (or Mono) programming with C#. My C# Programming course (in ten easy steps) gives you all this: Over 3.5 hours of video Code archive and eBook Basics of C# and .NET Cross-platform coding, Windows or Mac OS X Functions, methods and arguments (...)

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Three HTML5 Books

Review

Monday 10 December 2012

HTML5 is the latest and greatest way of creating web pages. It builds upon the static formatting capabilities of older versions of HTML by adding interactive features and better multimedia support. In order to create good-looking and dynamic web sites with HTML5 you will also need to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) version 3 and, optionally, the JavaScript language to program your pages. Here I take a look at three new books that explain some of the fundamentals of HTML5 web development.

Foundation HTML5 with CSS3: A Modern Guide and Reference $34.99 / £27.49 Craig Cook (Author), Jason Garber (Author) FRIENDS OF ED ISBN-10: 1430238763 ISBN-13: 978-1430238768 This book is principally aimed at beginners. However, given the significant new features of HTML5, the authors also claim that it provides a useful reference for more experienced users. It is worth emphasising the word ‘reference'; this book is structured in such a way that the reader should be able to dip into it to find information on specific topics. The chapters, are, however, arranged such that it would be possible to study the book study as a sequential ‘course' if that's what you want. There are ten chapters that cover subjects ranging from the basics of HTML and web browsing right up to (...)

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Where Object Orientation Went Wrong

Some thoughts on OOP

Tuesday 4 December 2012

These days if a programming language ain’t got that OOP, it ain’t worth a thing. Well, anyway, that’s how it sometimes seems.

When I started programming, back in the early ‘80s, hardly anyone had even heard of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). When ‘Byte' magazine published a “Smalltalk special issue” in 1981, the writers had to explain not only what object orientation was but also how a graphical user interface worked (most computers had text-based displays). They even had to give an explanation of a weird little pointing device called a ‘mouse' which was bafflingly strange to most readers. Now OOP languages are everywhere: C++, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Java, ActionScript, C#, Ruby and so on... And do all these OOP languages make programmers more productive? Do they make programs simpler, clearer and more elegant? The simple answer is: No, they do not. I've written an (...)

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Programming in English

More than just a game

Tuesday 20 November 2012

One day, the kind of programming we do now will no doubt seem crude in the extreme. All those ifs and fors, procedure-calls and whatnot surely can’t be the simplest and most elegant way for a human being to express ideas to a machine.

So why don't we program computers in, well, English? The obvious answer to this question is: because it's too difficult. English is complex and ambiguous. Most of the time when we write computer programs we aim for simplicity and clarity. Even so, being able to convey ‘natural language' instructions to a computer is a goal worth aiming for. Captain Kirk can do it so why can't we? One type of program that attempts to make sense of English commands is the good old text adventure. “Pick up the ring”, the player says. To which the game responds, “Do you mean the golden ring or the silver ring?” It's all very well that the game player can enter instructions in English. But the game programmer has to write instructions in Java or Ruby, C++ or Python. There (...)

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Learn To Program

Tuesday 13 November 2012

=http://www.bitwisecourses.com

Whether you are new to programming or whether you want to extend your programming knowledge to new languages and new platforms, these courses will give you the knowledge you need – fast! For the latest information, please go to the Bitwise Courses website: http://www.bitwisecourses.com Huw Collingbourne's multimedia programming courses have taught more than 3,000 people how to program in Ruby, Pascal, C# and more. Now you can be one of them. These courses will help you take the next step towards a fun and profitable career. Index of Courses Learn To Program with Pascal Ruby Programming For Beginners Advanced Ruby Programming Learn C# Programming Break into the Programming Business Learn To Program With Pascal ($99) Simply the fastest way to learn to program on a (...)

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Learn Cross-Platform Programming With Pascal

And save $60!

Wednesday 7 November 2012

I love Object Pascal. It’s a nice, clear, modern object oriented language. Trouble is, it can be expensive to get into. Embarcadero Software’s commercial Delphi environment for Object Pascal may cost you a few thousand dollars! But there’s an alternative. An it’s free.

Lazarus is a slick visual IDE that lets you design applications by dragging and dropping controls onto a form. You can add code to handle events and run or debug at the click of a button. Lazarus uses the Free Pascal compiler – and it is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. You can write applications on one of these platforms and compile them on another. In my view, this is the easiest way to break into cross-platform application development. Lazarus makes it easy to design and code an application on Windows… …then compile and run it on a Mac (or vice versa)! If you want to learn Lazarus and Object Pascal, where do you begin? Well, I've just published a new multimedia programming course on Udemy that will guide you from your very first steps (basic Pascal (...)

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Visual Studio 2012 - a personal view

Should you be excited?

Monday 5 November 2012

Microsoft has released the latest in its Visual Studio series – Visual Studio 11 aka Visual Studio 2012. While there are lots of new things in it, there’s no one unifying theme in this release, apart possibly for Windows 8 support and Windows App Store. There is, though, improved ASP .NET and .NET 4.5 framework support and there are a lot of minor improvements and new features.

But – there is a problem. Visual Studio 2012 doesn't look good. In fact, it looks horrible. Now this initial feeling of ‘yuk' happens quite a bit to me when I come across a new interface to a product I've used for some time and with which I'm very familiar. Mostly, I get used to it and move on. The initial dislike is simply due to unfamiliarity. However, with Visual Studio 2012 this hasn't happened. As I've used it over the last few months, I haven't grown to love it or like the look and feel – quite the reverse. So much so, that I now prefer to use Visual Studio 2010, but more of that later. The first thing that hits you when you open Visual Studio 2012 is the color: grey, monotonous, dull. The second is the menus across the top WHICH ARE ALL IN CAPITALS AND SHOUT (...)

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Pinnacle Studio 16 Ultimate

Video editing software

Sunday 4 November 2012

Pinnacle Studio 16 Ultimate
£99.95
Corel/Pinnacle Systems
http://www.pinnaclesys.com

Pinnacle Studio is a well-established video editing suite for Windows. It was previously made by Avid Technology but which was bought by Corel earlier this year. To a degree, this may seem to compete with Corel's other video editing suite, Video Studio Pro. Corel tells me that the main distinction between the two products is that Video Studio Pro is predominantly “consumer/beginner focused” whereas Pinnacle Studio is more “professional grade”. This is a review of Pinnacle Studio 16 Ultimate. See my review of Corel Video Studio Pro X4. The current version is Video Studio X6 - for details see here: http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4650075 While it is certainly possible to make professional-looking videos using Pinnacle Studio, it is not (...)

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Visual Studio 2012 - getting to grips with WiX

Installing made easy(ish)

Monday 29 October 2012

Writing an installer for Visual Studio is not simple task - especially if you want to support more than one version of VS...

One of the consequences of the release of Visual Studio 2012 has been the demise of the Visual Studio Setup and Deployment project (vdproj). To be honest vdproj was never that great and I can't say that I mourn its passing. But something has to replace it and the free InstallShield Express wasn't capable of building the installations that I require. I've been working on the next versions of Amethyst and Sapphire (Ruby in Steel) - the two Visual Studio IDEs made by my company, SapphireSteel Software. One of the jobs was to make sure that both worked with the new version of Visual Studio 2012. Mostly this has been straightforward with none of the labour required when moving from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010, when Microsoft introduced a new core text editor (that was hard (...)

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BB Flashback 4

Screen recording tool

Sunday 7 October 2012

BB Flashback 4 - £127 (ex VAT)
Blueberry Software
http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk

BB Flashback is a screen recorder that lets you make ‘screencast' movies by recording your interactions with applications running on Windows. It gives you the option of recording the entire screen, a selected window or a rectangular region which can be marked off using the mouse. It can record a voice narration and may include video recorded from a webcam. When you record from the webcam, the video is inserted in its own editable box so that it can be moved and resized independently of the video captured from your screen. You can also apply other effects while editing such as zooms and pans, and you can add annotations in the form of text, speech bubbles, arrows, boxes and buttons The principal new features in version 4 of BB Flashback are found in its video (...)

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Lazarus - write once, compile anywhere

The future of Pascal?

Monday 24 September 2012

You may have missed this news, in which case I take great pleasure in letting you know that version 1.0 of Lazarus has finally been released.

Version 1 of what you say...? Lazarus is a fantastic, free visual development environment that has a good code editor, a drag-and-drop interface designer and an integrated debugger. It runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. You can design and code on one platform then compile and debug on another. I've been using it daily for the past few weeks and it is remarkably good. It supports Object Pascal (via the Free Pascal compiler) and is closely compatible with Embarcadero's (formerly Borland's) Delphi. I was the Delphi columnist for PC Plus magazine for over ten years and I love Object Pascal. In the good old days, there used to be free versions of Delphi available - but not any more. Lazarus plus Free Pascal are a great free alternative. Give them a try. (...)

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BB Flashback 4

Screen recording tool

Wednesday 19 September 2012

Blueberry Software Ltd has launched BB FlashBack version 4, a new release of its screen recording software for Windows. New features include: Fade Transitions – add transition effects to join clips. Gallery - a library of annotations: text boxes, images, highlights etc. Blur Tool - to blur sensitive details in a movie. Record-time Notes - notes made during recording may be shown in text boxes in the movie. Export to GIF format. BB FlashBack costs £127+VAT and is free to download on a 30-day trial. Details are available from http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk.

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