This is a great tip for zooming in Word, Excell, and PowerPoint. It works for Office for Mac 2004 and 2008. The only application it does not work with is Entourage.
How To:
Hold down Command and Control and use the Scroll Wheel on your mouse.
or
Hold down Command and Control and Drag your fingers up/down on a scroll-enabled trackpad.
Here is a quote from the article
Microsoft’s Office 2004 suite is no exception—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (but not Entourage) all feature a View -> Zoom menu item. But using it is a bit time consuming. First you choose the menu, then you pick a pre-set zoom level, or enter your own value, and then click OK. You can also put a button on the toolbar which does something similar. Still, it’s hardly a fast and fluid operation.
Enter the mouse. In all three of the above applications, if you hold down Command and Control and then move the scroll wheel on your mouse (or drag your fingers on a scrolling-enabled trackpad), you can rapidly increase or decrease the zoom level. Move the wheel up, and you’ll zoom in; move it down, and you’ll zoom out. The amount the zoom changes with each tick of the scroll wheel varies between the applications. Word seems to go in 10-percent steps; Excel uses 15-percent increments; and PowerPoint steps through the fixed zoom levels (including ‘fit,’ which means I had a stop at 152 percent) in its Zoom menu. Excel and PowerPoint are also limited to 400-percent maximum zoom, while Word will go up to 500 percent.
Moses Gunesch, creator of Fuse Kit and ZigoEngine , has developed an AS3 Class which handles mouse interactions when dealing with transparent PNG’s.
Here is the theory:
If you have a PNG (one that contains transparent areas) embedded inside of a MovieClip button, the rectangle of the image acts as the hitArea of the MovieClip. In order for the hitArea to only be defined by visible areas of the image, you would normally have to create a custom mask in order to hide the transparent areas of the PNG. This AS3 Class allows you to specify an alpha tolerance (0=transparent, 255=completely opaque), that will allow you to selective exclude the transparent areas from your hitArea based on the value that you give it. This is a very simple concept, but an intricate implementation.
The project is open-sourced under the MIT Open Source License. Go and check it out:
We got our copies of Flash CS4. The UI is pretty sweet. They now have some pretty decent presets for workspaces. Here are screenshots of the six workspaces that come out of the box.
Check out this video on LivePlace. It demo’s a virtual world that is rendered server-side, much like Second Life. This demo video that was leaked is shown on a Treo 700 at 240kbps. This is some really awesome tech. The environments are super real and looks to break some barriers by allowing anyone with an internet connected device to interact with the world. This means that mobile users can dream of being in another world while on their commute in their mundane lives.
In this video you’ll see Steve Mason demonstrating Obscura Digital’s VisionAire technology. He’s not using any controller in his hands. He’s not moving in sync with a pre-recorded video. They are using some proprietary motion capture technology to capture his movements and translate them to on-screen actions. The image is being projected from the ceiling reversed to a mirror on the floor. The image is then reflected to a screen net that is at a 45 degree angle to the presenter. Steve is able to move his arms around freely without having to touch anything. The audience that is front and center get’s the best view, but if your off to one side you can see the screen net. These guys are a group of talented engineers here in the bay.
What’s Keeping Me? is an application that will locate, quit, relaunch, or kill the problem application that is preventing you from accomplishing a task (empty the Trash, eject a disk, etc…). HAMSoft Engineering: What’s Keeping Me?
