foolfillment: the blog

I’ve put together a wee tutorial on using Autodesk Inventor. I’ve been using the Professional 2008 version but most of it transfers across to other versions.

It is based around a series of screenshots hosted in a set on flickr with supporting notes. It works really well if you click through the set image by image. This is the first screen.

Flickr’s slideshow transitions mean that it is pretty slick when you watch it that way, although the notes added on top of the images don’t show - anyone know of a way around this other than editing the images themselves?

I’d love to know what people think of it, it was only a couple of hours work but would be nice to know I’ve not wasted that time.

The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

All Inventor files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you give attribution to me, you do not make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they must be covered by the same licence. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. I believe they were originally put together by Tom Bruce.

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Another post about a resource, I’ve just found Scrapblog (via meish.org). This tool lets you easily create scrap book style webpages where you can bring in photos from loads of different sites like flickr and photobucket, videos form youTube, then style them as you like, add text and colours.

Once it’s done you can publish it to a load of different places, you can produce DVDs, or flickr photosets, or books, even embed it in your own website.

It seem very easy to use and links in with loads of different sites so it could be a fantastic tool to use in schools to create reports about school trips, experiments, shows, anything.

Go and have a look at the scrapblog tour to see how easy it is to use.

I’ve been wanting to practise more with screen capture software recently, I have a copy of Camtasia which I have used a little in the past and last weekend my dad (just back from trekking in Morocco, now golfing in Thailand - spot the new retiree) said he wanted to know how to put photos on the web so he can share them with people. So I set to work putting together two very basic tutorials on using flickr.

You can see them on youtube now:

• Signing up to flickr
• uploading to flickr, using tags and adding contacts

The second one is very grainy for some reason, the source flv file is fine, I had the same problem on google video so if anyone has any bright ideas about why or an alternative way of hosting videos like these then could you let me know. I could host them here but I’d rapidly run out of bandwidth and webspace.

They follow hot on the heels of Andrew Brown’s excellent screencasts on keeping up with blogs and not missing blog conversations among other things. Andrew’s work has prompted me to download a trial copy of Adobe Captivate which I’ve yet to use properly, but I’m put off by the US$600 price-tag.