Paul's Blog 07017421: 4th Entry

The lecture was an overview of multimedia. A large subject covering text, clipart, graphics, animation, sound and video. In addition to this we also went over hypermedia and hypertext. While multimedia has been around for many years and is well established, hypermedia and hypertext are relatively new in comparison, only truly coming into their own with the advent of broadband. Hypermedia involves encyclopaedias, simulated micro worlds, expert systems and general learning systems. Hypertext involves electronic text, such as e-books and e-magazines.

We then looked at how this multimedia is produced and its different formats. We looked over text and how it is produced with ASCII, American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

Clipart is many found bundled with packages although some large clipart collections can be brought separately but seem to be becoming less and less common with the availability of images through the internet.

Graphics can come as raster, vector or bitmap. Bitmap files can be huge because it records the colour of every single pixel. These files can be compressed by other formats such as jpeg which looks at the general image and saves the relevant parts using them to calculate the rest of the image saving space. The difference between raster and vector is that you can resize vector as many times as you want and it will not get distorted while raster would.

Animation mainly comes gif, Flash, and Shockwave files. The animations that we create will start out as Flash files but can be converted to other formats to make them viewable in a web browser.

Digital sound mainly consists of mp3, wav and wma. Sound started out as wav which recorded all audio. MP3 offered compression by removing the sounds humans cannot hear, drastically reducing the file size. WMA offers a better form of compression allowing higher quality audio to be stored with less space. I’m not completely sure how it works differently but its good, trust me! Sound can be embedded in Flash as part of the animation file.

Digital video involves Quicktime, AVI and MPEG.

We then moved onto capturing media. Such as text capture, image capture with digital cameras and image processing, sound capture with microphones, and video capture with digital cameras.

The amount of file formats are definitely expanding which proves an added challenge for application developers to ensure their programs can interact with all the different file types.

To finish off the lecture we looked at the Cadburys advert with the gorilla on the drums to In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins. We first looked at the original and then a spoof someone had one where the music is replaced by the music to Eastenders. It showed us how animations can be easily changed by cutting parts out, repeating sections and adding music.

The lecture helped me understand the basic concepts of multimedia, and how it is used and how it can be used. I also understand the many file types used and an overview on how they work.

At home I had a look at a Wikipedia article on multimedia which gives a general overview of multimedia and its uses (4).

The tutorial was based on the usability of websites. We had a look at Glamorgan’s website and were asked questions based on its usability.

I found out that overall it is a very good website. The site is easy to use, has a very clean layout and is well ordered. One bad thing about it is that it takes a lot of clicks to find out details of a course. Instead of just using hyperlinks, a dropdown box could be used created a more compact menu system that could be incorporated into the front page of the site.

We then answered a usability checklist consisting of questions with boxes n/a, yes and no to tick. The list was huge! It would have taken me at least half an hour to complete. Some of the questions were hard to understand and it some were hard to judge given that only yes, no and n/a were provided. A one to five system would have been more appropriate. Also if the checklist had been more specialised, like separate ones for universities and businesses, it would have been a lot quicker and efficient to answer the questions. Questions could have also been rated for importance. For example easy navigation is more than including the date the website was last updated. The checklist was written in 1998 and so is out of date compared to the standards of today’s websites with multimedia playing a greater part now most people have high speed internet connections. The benefit of using a checklist is that you already have all the questions pre thought out and they are there in front of you but it can have a few disadvantages, not least in not being able to distinguish the best and worst feature of the site.

This tutorial was really useful helping me to understand what makes a good website. One key thing I learnt is that you can’t please everyone. I personally thought the clean interface was the best feature while others put it down as the worst feature claiming it to be boring. The usability of websites can be related to the usability of all general applications so I’m sure I’ll be able to use the knowledge gained from this tutorial in many other aspects of design.

At home I found two could websites outlining what doesn’t make a good website (1,2) and the disability guidelines for web designers to make their sites accessible for disabled people.