Educational Media Services is UAA’s instructional design headquarters for course development, learning objects and other training related services to UAA’s faculty. I designed the services portfolio and some of the featured projects.

I was very impressed with Adobe’s presentation of their latest release (CS3) . Even after surviving the AV difficulties for the webcast, the excitement was evident and we wanted to stick around and learn more about the enhancements. The integrated workflow enhancements of Photoshop and Illustrator to Flash and Dreamweaver are features that will definately make life easier for the designer/developer collaboration. As for me, I was just happy to see that they didn’t bury Fireworks under the ground but gave it a “brand new role” making it be more of the prototyping glue in the design process. I guess that’s good enough but it really does not make justice for what Fireworks can do within web development workflow that his now older and stronger brother “PhotoShop” cannot do. All in all, the merger of the suites is a success and those of us who love Illustrator to Flash workflow should be greatful for the improvements. In-Design was another product that struck more of my curiousity this time when before I just found it incredibly clunky and hardly worth a second look (Remember that I’m in web development and not in print so please forgive me if you’re a print designer and work with In-Design). As for the video realm of things, I just want to say that Adobe Premier and After Effects are just amazing!

Mike Chambers came to Alaska! His visit to the Adobe Developers User Group to talk about Apollo was very much anticipated but the event was not as popular as we thought it would be. Perhaps the Apollo buzz needs to grow more before it sparks the interest of more local developers, perhaps it is just too early for them to envision what could be done. I was excited though. I loved the sample applications and thought it has great potential, especially for what we build at the University and our challenges pushing distance learning courses. Apollo could bring another way of delivering e-learning, I could put away my CD ROM templates, forget about the publishing content to CD ROM and ship to students with poor internet connection in the remote Alaska villages. Well, still is a wait and see. I do have high hopes but very little time to experiment. All in all, it is exciting to see the changing times for us developers that’s for sure.