Archive for February 2009

Feb
27

The forums, they are a changin’

by Joseph Lowery

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I recently posted an announcement in the old forums about the upcoming revisions to our site. I thought I’d follow up with some more info on the blog, because once we make the switch that announcement will be lost.

The big news is that we’re switching to a very robust vBulletin solution. Community members will be able to take advantage of more advanced message and thread features including searching threads, ratings and much more. From the moderation side, we’ll be able to make high-impact threads sticky and participate more fully.

We’ve restructured the forums as well. Instead of the big (but often vague) buckets of Design, Development and eCommerce, each commercial product will have its own forum, as well each commercial training and solution pack. We have added several general topics on Dreamweaver, CSS, PHP and JavaScript so you can seek help on non-WebAssist areas.

Initially, the forums will be accessible from the web only. While vBulletin doesn’t offer NNTP support out of the box, there is a user contributed modification we’re exploring. Hopefully we can implement that before too long–I know that NNTP access is key for many of our contributors.

The new forums will go online Sunday morning with the new site. Once they are live, you can reach them from the main menu by choosing Company > Our Community > Forums or directly by going to www.webassist.com/forums. See you there!

Categories: WebAssist Announcements

Feb
24

Joy of Discovery

by Joseph Lowery

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I’m sure somewhere some university or institution has mapped the brain to see which synapses fire under certain circumstances. I’d love to see exactly where I get that little jolt of joy when I’m discovering what new, powerful software can do. I’m betting that any geek worth his or her salt knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I got more than a few zaps of synaptic flaring today as part of a task I’ve taken on for WebAssist. While Mark Fletcher is nose-to-the-grindstone cranking out training content like the recently released SEO Starter Kit, I’m going back to my old stomping grounds of creating the feature tours that accompany our product releases. It’s been a while–my last ones were created with a beta of Captivate 2 and Captivate 4 was just released–so I had a good amount of catching up to do. I don’t want to steal Mark (our resident Captivate super-expert) Fletcher’s thunder and speak about that program’s coolness, so I’ll leave that to him.

However, part of the process involves recording a voice over which, unless you’re buried deep in a high-end sound-proof room often means unwanted background noise. Happily, Adobe SoundBooth is part of the Creative Suite Web Premium bundle. SoundBooth is largely marketing as a tool used to create audio for Flash projects, but man is it awesome for recording audio for voice overs! Even the process is way cool. For example, need to remove a background hum that pervades your clip? Just highlight the wave form of the hum itself, click Capture Noise Print under the Clean Up Audio section and then execute the Noise command. SoundBooth analyzes your audio and extracts any sound that matches the captured noise print. Awesome!

Know how Photoshop has a Healing brush for removing flaws in your bitmaps? SoundBooth has an equivalent feature for sound that can heal popping p’s or sibilant s’s. Zap! There’s goes that synaptic charge again. If you have a chance, be sure to check out SoundBooth.

What’s even more exciting is that we’re in a position at WebAssist to create software, solutions and training that give you the same thrill of discovery. There’s a meta-thrill that we get in the creation process. We’ve been working on some upcoming projects that are definitely going to give you a jolt–and we can’t wait to zap you.

Categories: Tools

Feb
18

January 2009 Newsletter

by Hieu Bui

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This is a reposting of the newsletter we sent on January 21st 2009:

Hi everyone,

I hope 2009 finds you developing, creating and in a good position to achieve your goals for the year. I want to take this opportunity to recap the past year and share with you some of my thoughts as we head off into this New Year. Even though the global economy is experiencing quite a bit of volatility, I am happy to report that WebAssist is still continuing to grow and innovate thanks to your support.

To begin, I’d like to formally introduce myself to you in my role as President of WebAssist. While I have only been in this role since the early part of 2008, I am also one of the original founders of the company and have been deeply involved since the beginning. I’m very excited at this opportunity to continue to serve the large, growing, and passionate community of designers and developers that we have built together over the years.

We’ve been working tirelessly over this past year and when I look back, I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish. We consolidated our corporate headquarters into a new beautiful location in San Diego. We launched quite a few new products; PalettePicker, iRite, SiteScribe, CSS Menu Writer, Surveyor, Dynamic Web Charts in addition to releasing updated versions of our popular CSS Sculptor and SiteAssist plug-ins. We also introduced a new type of product called solution packs – pages with pre-built functionality you can use out of the box. We used Adobe Flex to develop a new community for designers called SuCasa and we’re happy to see the momentum continuing to build. We’ve also been working very hard over the past few months to make all of our plug-ins compatible with Dreamweaver CS4 and I’m happy to say that we’re almost ready to cross the finish line.

As I look forward into this coming year, we are prepared to continue investing across all of our initiatives. We will create new software with more robust features as well as insuring continuity and seamless integration throughout our product offering. We will focus on creating more solution packs (built using our software) and continue to deliver world class training products on the topics that are important and relevant to you. I am also pleased to announce that a new version of our website will be coming soon. It will include an updated look and feel as well as much cleaner navigation so it will be even easier for you to find what you are looking for on the site.

2009 will be our 10th year as a company and we want to dedicate it to you, our loyal customer. We here at WebAssist would like to thank each and every one of you for being a part of who we are today. Your continued feedback and interaction are critical as we strive to fulfill our mission of providing you with software, solutions, and training that help you build better websites, faster.

Best,

–Hieu

—
Hieu Bui
President, WebAssist

Categories: WebAssist Notes