Paul's Blog 07017421: 10th Entry

This weeks lecture started off with a look at the I-Phone interface. I’ve always been curious of the I-Phone but heard some rumours that it’s a bit overrated and too expensive for what it is but I had never actually seen the interface, until now! From what I could see, Apple’s done a really good job with the touch screen. It’s got a really flashy, innovative interface with some nice features such as zooming in with your fingers. I’m not sure if the novelty with the touch screen will last though. I’ve heard people say it can be a bit fiddly and typing with the keyboard can get a bit tricky.

We then moved onto the blogs. We were told some people had not referenced their links properly, referring back to Harvard referencing we learnt in the first tutorial. One thing I missed out on my links is the date last accessed so I’ll make sure I add that piece of information in the future. Geneen said she could tell who was going to be successful just by looking at our blogs, we all went silent after hearing that, self evaluating our own blogs, but I definitely understand what she means.

We then had a look at available jobs available to ICT graduates such as jobs related to project management, programming, design and forensics. I’m sure I can speak for everyone when I say how surprised we were to find out the amount of money involved with each one. You never really seem to think of the financial benefits of doing degree because of your current financial situation and because it seems so far away but it’s nice to see light at the end of the road, definitely a good moral booster!

Below are two links related to project management. One is a Wikipedia article and the other is a list of project management resources I found on the university’s website.

We also briefly looked at archives and how computers and the internet are being used to organise, digitalise, view and contain them. The internet is such a good resource for them when you consider the shear volume of some archives, such as the BBC archive.

We finished with an interactive Flash video of a snowball fight. The interactivity of the video came in the form of being able to change the characters faces. It really shows how much interactivity Flash can be capable of.

This lecture was certainly a very good moral booster and kick up the backside combined! It really is nice to see real world jobs we could go into after the degree is finished and makes us work extra hard to make sure we achieve what we want.

This week’s tutorial (and the last tutorial of 2007) was about embedding Flash animations. We were given a very scary coursework style scenario detailing that we had to embed the Flash file with the University of Glamorgan logo by its side on a specific blue background. I thought it would take me ages since it gave no instructions on how to do this but it actually took no more than ten minutes. Flash’s interface is very easy to use and shares some similarities with other programs so it wasn’t hard to import the video and logo and change the background to the specific blue by the hex code. It was interesting to use some different functions of Flash though. Its nice to know that a common feature is quick and easy to use.