Adobe Photoshop CS5 offers a new feature called Puppet Warp that allows you to slenderize, uplift, or transform anything in an image. By stretching, squeezing, and twirling pixels around anchor points, you can alter things in any way you can imagine. Here’s how:
Did you know that with the Eyedropper tool in InDesign you can pick up text specifications –including font face, size, tracking, color, and paragraph settings - and apply them to multiple text areas? It works much like the Format Painter in Microsoft Word.
When applying the Eyedropper tool to text, you can either: a) highlight the text that has the appearance you want to copy and then apply the characteristics elsewhere, or b) select the text to which you want to apply new formatting, and then point to a piece of text that has the desired appearance. Each is done a little differently. Here’s how you do it:
Have you ever needed to change or replace a backdrop behind a person’s face or a furry animal, only to be confounded by trying to make a detailed selection of the hair around the edges?
There are several techniques you can use to accomplish this, but Photoshop CS5 has come out with a dandy new way to select fine detail like you find in hair, without including unwanted background information.
Do you find your email inbox choked with many short messages pertaining to extended group discussions? By using IU UniCom’s Group Chat instead of email, you can avoid inbox congestion, gather messages all in one place, and keep them handy for as long as you want .
Group Chat is a part of the new UniCom version R2 suite available to the IU community through IUware. UniCom’s Group Chat is a Windows client that enables you to participate in multiparty, topic-based conversations that persist over time. Posts stay in the chat room after participants log out, so people from different locations can participate without having to be online at the same time. This way, Group Chat provides one place for all to see and participate in active conversations. Chat room members can keep many discussions open at a time, and can choose to be alerted when specified keywords come up in any chat room. With Group Chat, you can create a customized list of active discussions (a “My Chat dock”) that can be pinned to your desktop. Therefore, Group Chat enables you to do other things while still being ready to act on discussions pertinent to you. The Search feature allows you to find past discussions so you can review or keep up on issues. You can include documents and links in Group Chat discussions.
Group Chat is available to the IU community, but to get a group chat room you must apply for it through an administrator. To request one, contact your local support provider (LSP). See more about Group Chat and getting an account at http://kb.iu.edu/data/azll.html
See a demonstration video at http://tinyurl.com/iugroupchat
For more information about Group Chat, see Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat Getting Started Guide, at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=140485.
Using IU’s UniCom, you can easily generate a spontaneous conference call with one or more people at a time—including those without an IU username—and talk via audio* or instant messaging. Meet Now can be used within a group of UniCom users, but it also allows non-IU participants and those away from their desks to join via web browser. While running Meet Now with Windows, you can even take advantage of desktop sharing.
To initiate a Meet Now conference,
See a video demonstration at http://bit.ly/iumeetnow.
For more information, see: http://unicom.iu.edu.
To learn how to use Unicom, see http://ittraining.iu.edu/unicom/
*Note: Although participants of Meet Now meetings generated by UniCom Mode 2 and 3 users can instruct the service to connect them via a local phone, attendees of meetings initiated by users of UniCom Basic can participate by instant messaging only. However, if you are a Basic user with an IU Exchange Outlook client, by using Schedule a Conference in Outlook, people who join your conferences via web may participate with phone-based audio. For more information, see http://ittraining.iu.edu/unicom/.
Would you like to help someone on a document or troubleshoot their computer from a distance, even if they are not at IU? If you have a UniCom account at IU, you can easily do so.
Desktop sharing is a new feature offered in Office CommunicatorR2. Office Communicator is an application that allows you to communicate easily with others in different locations from your computer’s desktop using chat, voice, and video. The underlying system that drives its functionality is called Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). Until very recently, Unicom users needed to use a companion application called Live Meeting in order to share desktops. However, now sharing can be done straight from Communicator.
Even those who are not in the IU network can join in the meeting and enjoy full functionality, although the session must be initiated by a person who has an IU Unicom account and is using Windows. IU account-holders can use the Office Communicator console, and those who are away or not IU members can take full advantage by using a web-based interface that is designed to enable sharing on other platforms—PC, Macintosh or Linux. Note: At this time, Mac and Linux users can see desktop shares using Communicator Web Access (CWA), but cannot share their desktops with others.
For more information about getting an account and learning to use Unicom, see http://unicom.iu.edu.
As a web designer, developer, or administrator, are you constantly managing simple requests to change page content for nontechnical team members ? If so, you may find Adobe InContext Editing useful. InContext Editing gives clients and nontechnical team members the ability to update website content without having to learn any HTML. Potentially, this could save you a lot of time in updating web pages, providing time-consuming training, or recovering from user mistakes.InContext Editing is an online service that designers may use to allow content editors and publishers to update website content directly through their browsers — without compromising design integrity. Your team members won’t need to learn HTML, nor even install extra software. And for now, it is free.
If you have been using Twitter for a while, your Twitter Home page is probably becoming a blinding jumble of unrelated messages. Because all your feeds pour into the same space, you need to do a lot of weeding to find what you want–that is, if you have the patience. Now, with the new Lists feature, Twitter allows you to categorize and filter tweets in any way you like. Just create and name one or more Lists and then assign people you are following to your various Lists.
Here’s how:
In your Twitter space, click the Profile link at the top of the page. Under your username, click the Lists 
button and choose New List. You can name your list anything, and make it Public or Private.
Once you have one or more lists, in the “Following” section on the right of your Profile, click the View All link. To the right of each of your followed usernames is a List button: 
Click this button to see your lists, and then assign the selected username to a list.
Your Lists appear in the right section of your Home or Profile. Click a list to see only tweets that have been assigned to that list.
You can learn to use IU’s Oncourse Reorder Tools feature, or get training on how to conduct a Tandberg videoconference, by watching IU IT Training and Education’s award-winning tutorials.
In October IT Training & Education from Indiana University received awards for two training videos at the Fall ACM-SIGUCCS Conference in St. Louis, MO. ACM-SIGUCCS stands for The Association Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services; it is an international group of professionals involved in the support of information technology at institutions of higher education.
The communication awards were given in Category 3b: Electronic How-to Guides: http://www.siguccs.org/Conference/Fall2009/award_winners.html . Click “Read the rest of this entry,” below, to see the tutorials.
A flu epidemic or service outage due to weather can cause serious disruption of classes. IU has designed a new instructional resource to help instructors match their preferred teaching techniques with IU-supported technologies. The web site, structured around best practices of teaching, provides instructors with information about remote teaching and collaboration technologies, and supplies directions on where to get help from a consultant.
Check out the resources at: http://keepteaching.iu.edu/
