Bitwise Magazine

Scrivener – the word processor for writers

But can it really compete with Word?

Friday 7 June 2013

Scrivener - for Mac ($45) or Windows ($40)
Literature and Latte
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

You probably already use a word processor – Microsoft Word maybe? Or Open Office Writer? Those programs already have more features than most of us will ever use, so why would anyone want to change to some other word processing program? If you are a writer by profession, or an author by ambition, you may already have your own answer to that question. While big general-purpose word processors are packed with features, they don't always provide the ideal combination of research and organisation tools needed to plan, structure, write and revise an entire book. That is where Scrivener excels. Scrivener organises multiple documents in ‘The Binder' (at left of screen). You can create documents comprising text and graphics with split-window editing. In the pane on the right (...)

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Learn to program JavaScript

My latest course

Wednesday 29 May 2013

As you may know, I teach programming online.

A few days ago, I published a new course all about programming JavaScript. Here's a quick overview... Incidentally, if you know where to look, you can get this course at a substantial discount!

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Beginning C (5th Edition)

Book review

Friday 24 May 2013

Beginning C 5th Edition $59.99 / £35.50
by Ivor Horton
APress http://www.apress.com
ISBN-10: 1430248815
ISBN-13: 978-1430248811

Any book about programming C has a problem – namely: ‘The C Programming Language' by Kernighan and Ritchie (which I'll just call ‘K&R'). First published in 1978, K&R has undergone a number of revisions and to this day it is still widely regarded as the definitive work on C. K&R begins with then canonical ‘Hello world' program and so does ‘Beginning C'. The way in which this simple program is described in the two books gives an indication of their differing approaches. K&R describes all the features of that program – its syntax, the formatting and displaying of strings, the ‘main' function, the included library and so on – in under 3 pages. ‘Beginning C', by contrast, devotes about 10 pages to the same topic. To be (...)

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Visual Design for Adobe Flex and Flash

Amethyst 2

Tuesday 21 May 2013

My company, SapphireSteel Software, today launched a new version of Amethyst - our professional-grade IDE for Adobe Flash and Flex.

Adobe's own Flash Builder IDE for the Flex framework has actually removed its visual designer for the latest release. By contrast, we've extended the Amethyst visual designer. It can now be used to design form-like interfaces for ordinary Flash (non-Flex) applications as well as for Flex. There is a lot more than visual design in Amethyst 2, however. It also has an obfuscater, a profiler, support for games development with the Starling framework and tools to deploy mobile apps to iOS and Android. But, best of all, in my opinion, it has a great debugger that lets you step into method-calls in a series of linked bubbles. Here's a quick preview of this... More on the SapphireSteel Software web (...)

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Computer Keyboards: the old, the new and the faded

Not to mention the washable!

Thursday 25 April 2013

I’ve fimmally had emough of this danm’ keyboard! Yes, yes, I kmow – I cam’t tell ny ‘m’s fron ny ‘m’s…

So out the bloody thing goes! And in its place I have this lovely new one. And, at last, I can tell which letters are produced by which keys. The problem of letters that vanish from the keys over time is quite a common one. On my old Dell keyboard, the ‘N' and the ‘M' have long since vanished – and the ‘I', the ‘O', the ‘D' and the ‘H' are all rapidly going the same way. Search on Amazon for ‘permanent white marker' and you'll soon discover a great many people who have bought marker pens in the hope of restoring their faded keys. The Logitech K310 taking a shower I decided to take more drastic action. I bought myself a new keyboard. After some searching, the one I settled upon was the Logitech K310 – fairly cheap at under £30 (...)

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The Basics Of Cyber Warfare

Book review

Wednesday 10 April 2013

The Basics Of Cyber Warfare $29.95 / £18.99
by Steve Winterfield and Jason Andress
http://www.syngress.com
Computer Manuals
ISBN-10: 0124047378
ISBN-13: 978-0124047372

Cyber warfare may sound like rather a specialist subject. Increasingly in recent years, however, the general public has become aware of the threats posed by attacks upon computer networks, and this book aims to fill in some of the detail. ‘The Basics Of Cyber Warfare' provides a fairly simple overview of the topic. It explains the ways in which attacks and defences may be executed and it gives examples of various types of attack mounted by groups ranging from intelligence agencies to hacktivists, criminals and terrorists. It gives a very basic guide to the sorts of tools that may be used to gather information and gain access to, or compromise, supposedly secure sites. It also discusses physical attacks, for example using electromagnetic pulse weapons. While this is a slim (...)

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MotionComposer Review

Flash/HTML5 animation design software

Tuesday 9 April 2013

MotionComposer 1.6 (Mac), 1.0 (Windows) $149
Aquafadas http://www.aquafadas.com/en/motioncomposer/

Until quite recently, if you wanted to design and program cross-platform animations for display in a web browser your clear choice would be to use Adobe's Flash. With the advent of HTML5, however, you now have a choice. You can either create Flash animations programmed with ActionScript or you can render the animations with HTML5 programmed in JavaScript. Here I have created a simple animation in MotionComposer for Windows. The three ‘states' of the animation are shown in the ‘slide' at the bottom. Each state is like a keyframe on a conventional time-line based system. For many animators, the programming part is the barrier. Which explains why artists and designers have often used tools such as Adobe's Flash CSS IDE which make it possible to design user interfaces and (...)

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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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