An Event Apart San Francisco Recap

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Kirsten

aea-logoLast month I had the privilege of being able to travel to San Francisco for An Event Apart. Besides the unruly flights (with connections in Atlanta) and the overall dreary weather of San Francisco (thanks rain and sleet!), it was a fantastic time.

This was my first An Event Apart and I was particularly struck by a few things.

First, mostly all of the seminars offered directly related to my work and career. There was no picking of what classes you wanted to take, but rather, you sat in one room all day and the presenters came to you.

Second, it was a well planned event. There were 15 minute breaks between seminars, ample time to hit the restroom or schedule your dentist appointment back home (yep, I did that), and each day was just long enough. Monday’s classes ran from 9 am to 6:15 pm and Tuesday’s classes ran from 8:15 am to 5:30 pm (although many would tell you that Tuesday’s 8:15 am was optional since it was a Microsoft presentation, ;-) ). Lunches were 1.5 hours long and were great opportunities to have a leisurely lunch and get to know other conference attendees.

Thirdly, the food was fantastic! Fully catered breakfasts and lunches made me feel important and eliminated the stress of “Where is my next meal?!”.

And finally, all of the presenters were just really cool. Most of them walked around the ballroom and hallways during breaks, talking to various attendees, and shaking people’s hands. They were all really nice people and easily approachable. It was nice to know that I was amongst such down to earth people.

There were quite a few presentations that stuck out in my mind. The following is my attempt to document the knowledge I picked up at this conference.

Continue reading →

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Adobe Acrobat = Interactive

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Kirsten

f_412wx9cbdlsm_ce15fa5I just watched an Adobe live seminar on “Interactive Adobe Acrobat.” It was super interesting! Here are the two things I picked up from it:

  1. When making a PDF of a webpage you shouldn’t go to Firefox or Safari and Print as PDF. Instead, you should go into Acrobat and go to File > Create PDF > From Web Page… This function takes all of the CSS and functionality of a web page and puts it right into a PDF for you. Search boxes still work, links, etc. If you click on a nav option on a web page it’ll launch your browser and go right to the page that was linked! What I found is that it does take a bit of time so be patient while it downloads all that data!

    If you only have the first level of a website downloaded, say, the first page, and would like yet another page embedded within the same PDF you can do that too. Just right click on the link that you would like downloaded on your page and go to Append to Document. There you go!

  2. The second thing I learned is really an overall lesson. You can seriously make an entire PDF behave almost exactly like a website. This is exciting stuff! Embedded movies, image rollovers, navigation, and more can all be included in your PDF if you take the right steps in your InDesign document first. InDesign CS4 is much more powerful than the versions that came before it so I’m going to make sure I go and investigate some of the panels like Hyperlinks, Buttons, and Page Transitions. Take a look yourself and I’m sure you’ll learn something new!
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Pop Music 2009 Mashup Music Video

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Kirsten

I love remixed videos and thought this one was pretty cool; a nice recap of the hottest 2009 pop songs.

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Disable Submit Button Until Checkbox is Checked

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Kirsten

Here’s an interesting tidbit of code I worked out today for a client website:

$(document).ready(function() {
$('input.button').attr('disabled', true);
$('input.button').attr('value', 'Please accept our terms to submit');
$('.accept input').bind('click', function() {
if ($('.accept input').is(':checked') == true) {
$('input.button').removeAttr('disabled');
$('input.button').attr('value', 'Send Memory');
} else {
$('input.button').attr('disabled', true);
$('input.button').attr('value', 'Please accept our terms to submit');
}
});
});

It’s JQuery for disabling a submit button until a checkbox is checked. In addition, as an added usability feature, the button says “Please accept our terms to submit” so that the user knows why the button isn’t able to be clicked.

In this example “button” is the class of my button and my terms checkbox is wrapped in a span with a class of “accept” (had to work around ASP.NET here at work thank you).

This post will most definitely be useful if I ever look for this functionality again!

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Video on a PC

Posted on December 17, 2009 by Kirsten
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