Many months ago my website was hacked by the Pharma hack that has hit many wordpress blogs. Essentially this caused my Google Search results to get all funky and point to various prescription drugs (see screenshot).

I spent several hours trying to clear the hack myself, and followed the advice of many people, but unfortunately the hack kept coming back. So I would spend a couple more hours trying to unhack it. Anyway, it was all just a gigantic waste of time, and eventually I contacted Sucuri.net to do the cleanup on my site because I really didn’t want to spend 10 hours trying to unhack it.

Sucuri was able to unhack my website and provide monitoring and unhacking for a yearly fee of $89 for my site, which is a pretty sweet deal. Yeah, I could have spent the time, and done all the unhacking myself, but if you assume it would have taken me about 10 hours to do (which it likely would have), and Sucuri could do all that work for just $89 and I figure my time is worth more than $8.90 per hour.

For a free scan from Sucuri, or to sign up for service, click the gigantic affiliate ad below.

For more info on the Pharma hack and how you can clear it click here. (note: That blog post helped me, but the hack returned about 6 hours later, because the hacked files appeared outside of my wordpress directories).

Seriously a long time since I posted last, but wanted to let you all know that I’m speaking at mLearnCon and it would be awesome if you attended my session or just said hello to me.

I am presenting on Creating Video Podcasts from Screencasts and Other eLearning Videos.

Here is a brief description of my session:

Would you like to take your screencasts and eLearning videos and make video Podcasts for easy deployment and viewing on mobile devices?

Participants in this session will learn how to create video Podcasts of screencasts and videos, and how to submit them to popular vodcasting services like iTunes. This session is not focused on a particular tool, but on how to format your eLearning content so it is readily available for mobile users.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to create a video Podcast feed
• How to format your video to play back on most mobile devices
• How to submit your Podcast to iTunes
• Things to watch out for

Audience: Novice and intermediate participants with basic familiarity with mobile devices and video

Technology: Screenr, videos from other sources, and emulators for the iOS (iPhone simulator) and Android devices

I hope to run into some of you, so feel free to make sure to say hello if you see me.

Over the past week or so I have sent over some content to Litmos so they can show off the beta of their new mobile app that can play and track Articulate content on mobile devices that support the Flash Player.  Well last night Litmos founder @richchetwynd posted the video below showing Articulate Quizmaker working on his Google Nexus One.

This is awesome and is making me want to get a Nexus One  Check it out:

Mobile SCORM tracking of Flash based content on the Google NexusOne phone from Litmos Team on Vimeo.

Many thanks to everyone who voted for me in the MyDomain Brand .ME contest.  Because of your votes I won the Best Personal Brand in the Subject Expert category of the contest.

As I mentioned in this post, if I won the contest I was going to give away my iPad.

And the winner of my iPad is @LindaLor!

View on Screenr

If you are curious about the stats of the contest…

• 70+ took part in the #WinDavesiPad contest
• Over 260 people voted for me
• Almost 1300 people clicked on the http://mozealo.us/6 link in the #WinDavesiPad tweets

Another huge thanks to Adam Edgerton and the other good folks at http://www.mydomain.com for putting on the contest.  If you need a domain, or domain hosting I highly recommend them.  They sponsored a great contest!

Congrats Linda, I’ll be contacting you about the iPad.

Just something to think about when you are deciding to build that new product.

• Bill Gates unveiled the Tablet PC in 2000 at COMDEX (10 years before the iPad)
• Audio Highway announced their Listen Up MP3 player in 1996 (5 years before the first iPod)
• The GUI (Graphical User Interface) was actually first developed by Xerox, not Microsoft Windows or Apple
• Screenr wasn’t the first web based screen recorder

It really doesn’t matter if you are first to market.  Often times it makes it easier if someone goes before you because you can learn from their mistakes, learn what you can do better, then execute.

I was recently picked as a finalist for the MyDomain Brand .ME contest for having the best personal brand in the Subject Expert category.  The cool thing is if I win, I get $1,000 in Apple gift cards.  This is obviously cool for me, and I encourage everyone to vote (for me), but really, other than helping me out what does this get you?  Well, now if I win I have decided to give away my 16GB Apple iPad to one lucky person.

Dave's iPad

I didn’t really like the thought of asking people to vote for me just so I can win something, so I decided to offer up my iPad to YOU if I win.

Here is what you can do to win my iPad

1. Go to http://www.mydomain.com/brandme and vote for Dave Mozealous by April 28th
2. Follow me @dmozealous on Twitter
3. Post a message on Twitter that says:
   

   I voted for Dave Mozealous in the MyDomain Brand .ME contest for a chance 2 #WinDavesiPad you should vote for Dave here: http://mozealo.us/6

4. Tell all your friends to vote for me too. I am giving the iPad away only if I win, so the more people that vote for me, the better my odds of winning and giving away my iPad.

If I win the contest I will randomly select one lucky person who tweeted the message above to win my iPad.

If you have ever tried to use the Twitter search you have probably noticed it doesn’t feel much like a search.  It is more of a live filter or live pulse for a specific word, showing you a stream of live tweets containing that word.  Try using the Twitter search at http://search.twitter.com and search for something like “#CS5″ (Adobe Creative Suite 5) and you will see what I mean.  It doesn’t return the most interesting results, it just returns the most current results (imagine if Google did this).  Don’t get me wrong, current is cool, like in the event of an earthquake, or zombie apocalypse it is nice to “See what’s happening — right now.”  But maybe that isn’t what you are looking for, maybe you want to find the most interesting Tweet on #CS5, or in the case of Screenr the most interesting screencast on PowerPoint, not just the most recent.  So several months ago I was bored and set out to build a better search system for Screenr, and I did, and here is how I did it.

How to make a better search

This morning the New York Times posted an article on TweetUp, a company that is building a smarter search for Twitter (read the article here).  Essentially, what they are trying to do is turn the search into more than just a pulse, they want an actual search, like Google’s that ranks the search based on factors to determine if it will be the most relevant.

TweetUp measures a Tweets popularity by:

• Measuring how often readers repost the tweets (number of ReTweets)
• How many clicks each links get

They also just raised $3.5 million in funding for this concept (along with an interesting monetization idea).

Measure interestingness by the number of ReTweets

I think this is a pretty cool concept, if something is ReTweeted it usually means it is interesting, and the more ReTweets a tweet gets, the more interesting it is.  What I was happy about was this was the same conclusion I came to when building my search.  So tweets that are more heavily ReTweeted should appear higher in the search results, so this is what I did.

Other ways to measure interestingness

So I kept thinking about this and wondered if there were other ways that you could measure “interestingness.”

Here were some alternative ideas I had for measuring interestingness:

• Reach – “Reach” I defined as the total number of followers of everyone who tweeted the screencast.
• Views – Simply measuring the number of views of a particular screencast.
• Views per Reach - The number of views of a particular screencast divided by the “Reach” of the tweet.  The idea behind this though would be that the most interesting screencast would be the one that compelled people that saw the Tweet to actually view the video.

The difficulty of these approaches is that at Screenr we don’t give you access to the number of views through any type of API so that I can analyze the data, and when trying to determine the “Reach” of a Tweet it can use several hundred API calls to twitter that quickly push you over the API call limit.  So I abandoned any of these other approaches.

How I built my search

Here is a quick rundown of what I did:

• Dump all Screenr tweets from Twitter in a database every hour using the Twitter API. Twitter only gives you access to a couple of weeks worth of data using their search.  To deal with this I run an automated script every hour that dumps all tweets that contain the text “http://screenr.com” into a database.  This database is what I use for the search queries.  Obviously on screencasts that have been tweeted will show up in my search results because I am using the Twitter API.
• Search the database when someone searches, then rank results based on RTs. When you search using my search tool, I will query the database and find every screencast that uses your search term.  I then look for which screencast has been tweeted the most, then display that Tweet at the top of the results.

Pretty simple huh?

Use my Twitter based search for #Screenr

If you want to try it out you can use my Screenr search here:

Or by visiting it directly here:

http://www.mozealous.com/screenr/

This isn’t an official Screenr search

Just so you know, this is something I was just playing around with, at some point in the future Screenr will release an official Screenr search that is better than this.

How this search can be improved

There are a couple of things I don’t like about my search, and I think that it could be improved.  Here is what I think should be done:

• Only display the original tweet in the search results (no need to show all RTs)
• Create a better search results page, like maybe something like what YouTube does, or Bing video search, that shows the video, or video thumb, not just video description.  After all, you are looking for the video, not the description.
• Handle apostrophes better.  I don’t handle them well.

You should improve it

If you are interested in improving this search, and are comfortable programming in PHP I would be more than happy to give you access to source code I used to build this search.  If you are, let me know in the comments and I’ll give you the code and the current database I am using that stores the tweets.

Over the past week I have Tweeted about the iPad excessively (over 120 tweets in 4 days) and many were completely absurd. I have posted them in a diary format so I could see my impressions/feelings/thoughts about the release as time progressed. I also added some context to Tweets that might have seemed random. As a QA Manager, part time Product Manager and amateur marketing specialist I think it helps me to get this all down so that I can learn from it for our future products.

So here are my iPad related tweets since April 1st

April 1st

Why is my iPad still in China? Shouldn’t it be in the US by now?

8:47 AM Apr 1st via TweetDeck

Ok, by this point I am starting to think their is no way that my iPad will be delivered on time, and growing pissed I didn’t wait to pick one up at the Apple store on Day 1.

Trying to think of an analogy comparing watched pot not boiling and watched iPad shipment tracking not moving…
8:50 AM Apr 1st via TweetDeck

Seriously, my iPad hasn’t moved in Days.

So…my #iPad just left Hong Kong. Going to make the guess right now that it doesn’t arrive by 4/3…
6:56 PM Apr 1st via TweetDeck

RT @arlynasch: My friend @dmozealous tried to get Google directions from China to his house to estimate how long it would take to deliver his #iPad. || True
7:08 PM Apr 1st via TweetDeck

This is true. Unfortunately Google Maps won’t calculate travel time for this.

This is where my iPad is http://post.ly/XASM
7:12 PM Apr 1st via Posterous

Some remote island off the coast of Hong Kong…

April 2nd

My #iPad must have stumbled into a Hot Tub Time Machine. Left China today, arrived in Alaska yesterday: http://tweetphoto.com/16801797
6:41 AM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

At this point I am not only growing impatient, I am also thinking I am really hilarious. Two topics I have tweeted about the most over the last 3 weeks combined into one really great tweet. I pat myself on the back and continue to work.

Hoping the iPad really increases my productivity to make up for the lost productivity tweeting about its arrival.
7:53 AM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

I am on fire!

Contemplated building a Norad/Santa tracker style app last night via UPS API to track my iPad for my website. #Iamatool
8:22 AM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

Yep, I sure did. Apparently UPS offers an API. Figured by the time I got this up and running though, my iPad would be here. I kinda suck at programming.

@dustinbrockman how come?
11:13 AM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck in reply to dustinbrockman

For some inexplicable reason I got a lot of @message spam from bots saying “@dmozealous got my #iPad and already sending it back”. Still not exactly sure what this is about…all the messages came via the Twitter API, so they were bots, but why spam me telling me this? I replied to the spam bot above before realizing it was a spam bot. I got about 4 of these messages from other spam bots over the weekend. I had some theories about why I was getting the spam:

1. A plot by Adobe to fill the Twitter stream with seemingly unhappy iPad owners over the absence of Flash. After thinking of this I quickly fashioned a tin foil hat to make sure the folks at Adobe couldn’t read my thoughts.
2. Someone just didn’t like the iPad fanboys and decided to crap all over their day…

Fairly certain I am going to have to visit the xanax fairy to get some sleep tonight…
11:47 AM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

In case you don’t know what Xanax is, it is a prescription drug to help those cope with anxiety.

TweetDecks iPad app looks better than their desktop app: http://bit.ly/9eVqP8
11:49 AM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

I view a video of the TweetDeck app, and sure enough, looks better than the desktop client. Seriously.

Sleeping on the couch tonight instead of upstairs in my room. Just in case the UPS guy comes really early. I don’t want to miss him.
3:00 PM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

Again, I am hilarious…and if you are curious, did I sleep on the couch? No, I slept in my bed…with my door open

Anyone else leaving out milk and cookies for the UPS delivery guy?
3:00 PM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

also going to leave out carrots for his reindeer…
3:02 PM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

and finally, going to clean out my fireplace in case he decides to come down my chimney.
3:03 PM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

True hilarity.

In between 3:00 PM and 9:00 PM I am actually on a blind date, and I see a couple of snarky tweets from Tom Kuhlmann and Jeff Holton who both bust my chops and tell me I need to get a life, and a wife and kids, in response to my excessive over the top tweeting. Takes me awhile to respond because hey, I am on a date, but as soon as I get in my car after the date I post this response:

@tomkuhlmann @JeffHolton reason i need a wife and kids is so that we can wait for my iPad in shifts. I want to go riding tomorrow too.
9:21 PM Apr 2nd via TweetDeck

At roughly 10:00 PM I get home, take my dog out, and lock my keys in my house. I get a little panicked that I might not be able to get in my house by the time the UPS guy shows up. Luckily my neighbor is a master lock picker with a credit card, so I am in my house around 10:30 PM.

April 3rd

My #iPad is in Boulder!!
5:35 AM Apr 3rd via Echofon

Wake up at 5:35 AM, can’t sleep, check the UPS status of my iPad, and great news, it is in Boulder. Looks like I am going to get my iPad!

I wonder if the UPS IT department is freaking out because of a potential F5 attack coming from Boulder right now.
6:21 AM Apr 3rd via Echofon

F5 is a way to refresh your browser. I keep refreshing to see if my iPad is out for delivery.

Use Twitter location search to see how close the iPad delivery is to your house…
6:22 AM Apr 3rd via Echofon

Think this is a cool idea. I do a location search in Boulder to see if others around me are getting their iPads. Unfortunately I don’t see much traffic.

RT @mrch0mp3rs: IT HAS ARRIVED http://twitpic.com/1cwd0v // Nice!!!
6:32 AM Apr 3rd via Echofon

Aaron Silvers gets his iPad pretty early. I am now officially jealous.

All quiet from me till 4:03 PM…why so quiet? I am really pissed that my iPad hasn’t arrived, been sitting on my couch all day napping. My butt is actually starting to get couch sore.

At 12:00 PM I take my dog out to hang out outside. I position myself to face the door to my building so that I don’t miss the UPS guy.

Around 12:30 PM I call UPS and ask if I can drive to the UPS distribution center and pick up the iPad. UPS says no go.

At 1:30 PM I am certain my iPad isn’t going to make it today. It is 1:30 PM and I really wanted to go for a bike ride, that probably won’t happen now as there is a 40 mph wind blowing. I am officially pissed at UPS for not giving me a delivery window and Apple for choosing a Saturday date.

And then, at 2:03 PM April 3rd:

Finally… http://post.ly/XaUk
2:03 PM Apr 3rd via Posterous

I try to film an unboxing experience via my iPhone. It turns out really lame as the box is impossible to open one handed. Scratch the idea to film the unboxing.

The iPad is heavier than I imagined.
2:07 PM Apr 3rd via Echofon

Initial thoughts:

• Box is cool and minimalistic…
• iPad is really heavy. Actually hard to hold with one hand.
• Glad they charge the iPad before delivery. Isn’t it lame when you buy something battery operated and you have to charge before using it? Props to Apple for paying attention to the details.
• Charger is lame. It is like the 1st gen iPhone charger but without the dock.
• Device is stunningly beautiful, but I already knew that.
• Headphones don’t have the built in microphone.
• After turning it on: Is my screen scratched?

Every time I see an iPhone, iPod, iPad box I can’t help but be reminded of this parody:

Tweeting from tweetdeck on my iPad.
2:24 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

First app I install is TweetDeck, again it is a great app.

Just bought the book Drive for the iPad to replace the physical copy I left on the bus.
2:34 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

iBook

First iBook I buy. Tried getting these, none of which are available:

• Anything by Michael Lewis
• Me 2.0 – by Dan Schawbel
• Catch me if you Can
• Catcher in the Rye
• Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All

Finding it surprisingly difficult to find iBooks that I want to read.

Need to get to a coffee shop stat, and smugly sit reading a book on my iPad and make snide remarks about users using their laptops.
2:35 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

Sometimes I can be an arrogant prick.

NetFlix

@GetAdam Blow via Netflix app is pretty sweet.
4:34 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck in reply to GetAdam

Figured out that NetFlix is awesome on the iPad.

Typing is harder than I thought on the iPad….hunt and peck.
4:42 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

More love..

RT @mrch0mp3rs: If you had two iPads this Passover, you could really blow some minds with the Ten Commandments as the wallpaper.

So true…

So…when can I get the Wired magazine iPad app: http://bit.ly/9sEXlP
4:56 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

Ok, the video on the Wired magazine iPad app is really important. Watch it below and then I’ll discuss.

After seeing this video for the first time I became ecstatic about the device. This video showed me what is going to be possible with the iPad. It has the potential to revolutionize a dying industry (the print industry). The magazine is sick. It is interactive, engaging, even the ads are compelling and as the guy that looks like Agent Smith from the Matrix points out, “It is going to enable us to view and consume media in an entirely different way…

I search for the Wired magazine app for a couple minutes and doesn’t look like it is out yet. More on this later.

The default iPad desktop wallpaper is horrible, the falling stars look like screen scratches.
6:04 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

Technically they are time lapsed stars…point is they look like scratches
6:05 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

I was not alone on this. Of the 6 other people I know with iPads 5 said “I thought the same thing” and even random folks were tweeting me about it.

Day 1 favorite #iPad features: internet browsing experience is awesome, battery life is incredible
7:54 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

Still shocked by this. Browsing doesn’t feel as though I am browsing on a giant iPhone. It feels like an optimized internet experience. Everything looks stellar, typing a little goofy, but pages render fast. Awesomesauce. Also I am about 6 hours in and haven’t even made a dent in the battery, still cruising at 80-90%.

You know why everyone is sitting with #iPad in lap in the commercials? The thing is to damn heavy to hold and control one handed.
8:06 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

Arms getting tired…

iPad commercial comes on TV, I am inspired to comment about everyone sitting down.

Update: Check this slideshow showing picks from the various iPad adds/promotional material. Everyone is sitting down with some sort of leg cross to prop up the device.

Lamest iPad app has to be the Wall Street Journal. The trick you into registering for free access then give you no content. #wsj
8:09 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

Tip: if you heavily promote the app for the device launch, don’t make people register to view “free content” and then not give them any free content till day 3. No explanation from them in the app about this anywhere. Really broken feeling first experience.

Giant elephant in the room about Flash, or is it…

Anyone else notice that the blue no-Flash icon doesn’t appear on the #iPad for Flash controls?
8:37 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

This is fairly significant. Apple kinda got crushed by some folks on the internet in the first couple weeks for showing someone browsing the New York Times paper and what appeared to be Flash video . So Apple quickly replaced the promo video with one that showed the familiar missing plugin icon in place of the Flash content. See screenshot below of my site and the missing Flash.

Mozealous.com without Flash

Why is this so significant? Well before, whenever you would see the blue missing plug-in icon the page would be glaringly broken. Any page you saw this on would give you pundits ammunition to criticize the device. How does Apple deal with it? Remove the blue icon and the missing Flash becomes less noticeable. Sure it is very noticeable on my site, but think of other sites that have tiny Flash control widgets in the sidebars. Those appearing as white spaces appear less broken than blue icons…

Mail felt goofy at first

Took me awhile to realize the #iPad mail app makes a lot more sense in landscape mode.
9:19 PM Apr 3rd via TweetDeck

I didn’t really dig the mail app when in portrait mode. The default portrait mode view doesn’t show you a list of your email. If you switch to landscape everything is glorious.

April 4th

Kindle App

The kindle’s iPad app has much better selection of books than Apples selection.
6:01 AM Apr 4th via TweetDeck

I finally discover the Kindle app after finding out that they offer many more book titles. Of the books I had previously searched for in the iBook store and not found most are available in Kindle App for iPad.

Browsing

Just bought a domain via iPad on GoDaddy. Complicated Internet task took 4:15. Now will compare tontime on laptop…6:38 AM Apr 4th via TweetDeck

I needed to buy two domains. I figured I would time how long it took to purchase on my iPad vs my fired up laptop. (Note the misspellings here “tontime” should have been “to time”, one thing I have been doing a lot is hitting “b” or “n” when trying to hit spacebar).

Domain purchase on already running laptop took 2:50 compared to #iPad 4:15. Further tests needed though #iPad didn’t seem that much slower.
6:51 AM Apr 4th via TweetDeck

Because typing is a little bit slower, doing complicated internet tasks is slower. In fairness though, I did test this on GoDaddy.com, which is a really complicated site to use, and I bought the domain on my iPad before trying on my laptop, so I knew how to navigate on my laptop. Also, firing up the laptop took well over 2 minutes, where iPad was instantaneous.

RT @arlynasch: Ok, now go back and take a look at your iPhone. Absolutely Lillyputian…
10:25 AM Apr 4th via TweetDeck

This is actually pretty significant as well. I was growing increasingly frustrated using the browser on my iPhone when on the couch or any place in the house really. Internet usage on the iPhone begins to falling drastically.

At the coffee shop, everyone reading physical newspapers but me. Everyone else seems soooo 2009.
10:30 AM Apr 4th via TweetDeck

Ha, all those suckers on their traditional media devices. Might as well have been stone carvings or cave art.

More Kindle love…

The Kindle #iPad app offers 5x (450k) the number of books that the Apple iBook does (90k).
about 20 hours ago via TweetDeck

Ok, beginning to think Kindle app might do well on the iPad. Apple will catch up, but right now, Kindle app is king.

Men’s Health iPad Magazine Sucks

The Men’s Health iPad app sux. Wanted to try out a magazine app. Very disappointed, text is unreadable.
about 16 hours ago via TweetDeck

Seriously Men’s Health charges you $5 for 80% ads, and JPEG’d copies of their print articles. Way to mail in your iPad support guys.
about 16 hours ago via TweetDeck

Sent an email to address listed on Men’s Health app website to complain, email address bounced…
about 16 hours ago via TweetDeck

Ok, remember above when I was talking about how great the iPad was going to be for magazine publishers and how it was going to allow us to consume media in an entirely new way? Well, Men’s health seemed to miss the point. They did nothing more than provide a PDF copy of their traditional print version, and somehow managed to make the text NON-vector, meaning it didn’t scale well, and can hardly be read.

Here are all things I hate about the Men’s Health Magazine

• It’s $5 for a PDF copy of their print magazine
• Text is unreadable (see image below)
• Content isn’t interactive at all
• Why did I pay $5 for this again?
• The email address for the iPad app support is broken, so if you complain your email bounces
• Of the first 6 pages, 5 are ads.

I might blog about this more later, specifically about how Men’s Health is sacrificing any credibility they had by charging so much for such a terrible experience. But I’ll spare you the rest of my Men’s Health rant for now.

Men's Health Sucks

Notice how poorly the text is rendered.

New wallpaper

My iPad wallpaper, morbid eh? (via @gizmodo) http://post.ly/XrHe
about 16 hours ago via Posterous

As I mentioned previously, the default Wallpaper on the iPad makes it seem like the iPad is scratched. I replaced the default wallpaper with a wallpaper that looks like the hand of someone being eaten by a zombie.

Overall impression

Ok, so now it is Monday and everyone is asking me what I think of the device. I got to say, I love this thing. Their are some missing things, but really this device does exactly what they promised. It fits someplace between a laptop and a smart phone, and it does. And although Men’s Health really sucks, when magazines actually start targeting the device as a unique delivery platform (like Wired) it is going to allow us to have really rich media experiences with the device.

My impressions in my Tweets might seem overwhelmingly negative, but hey, I am a Quality Assurance Manager for a software company where it is my job to find flaws.

The biggest reasons not to purchase I have heard from non-early adopters are:

• Lack of Flash support
• No USB/Firewire support
• No tethering
• No camera

I agree that the lack of Flash support sucks, and think this will eventually change once competitive devices add it (like Android). Right now Flash Player 10.1 is still in Beta, which is the first major release of the Flash Player that targets mobile devices. So even if Apple wanted to add it, they weren’t going to add it while it was still in beta right?

I also am going to love the camera addition on my 2nd generation iPad

The other stuff (tethering/USB) I could really care less about. I am not really sure what USB device I would hook up to it anyway, and as far as tethering…I am on the AT&T network so trying to do anything on that network that involves data is nearly impossible.

Have you ever wanted to develop your own custom Articulate Presenter player to give your eLearning courses that extra bit of customization?  Have you ever been tasked with developing eLearning content for a client who didn’t want you to use the Articulate Presenter player?  Did you know it IS currently possible to develop your own totally customized skin, and it actually isn’t that hard?

I built my totally customized #Articulate Presenter skin in less than an hour and you can too.

Here is what you will need to do to develop your own skin:

1. Build a skin using the Articulate SDK to mask the actual Articulate Presenter skin (a 980×640 SWF file that we will load on top of the Articulate Presenter Player).
2. Build an ast_remote.swf file to load our custom skin on top of the Articulate Presenter player
3. Package our skin in a format that can be easily shared and installed.

Worried that you don’t know how to use Flash?  No need to worry.  I don’t know Flash either.

Let’s check out the player I developed.  The idea was I wanted a small sized player that I could fit in my blog and would play well on devices with smaller screens, like mobile devices that have the Flash Player.  I also wanted to make it Zen, so it has only a few buttons.  So here it is below, click the play button to start playback.

View at Mozealous.com

Notice the big play/forward/back buttons, the mute icon, and the slide counter.  Very minimalist and blog friendly right?

1. Let’s build a skin to mask the Articulate Presenter skin

So how did I build it?  Well the first thing I did was build my custom skin in Flash.  What we are going to do is build a Flash file that will mask (hide) the actual Articulate Player.

Check out the 4:15 screencast below to see how I created the skin.

If you want to play along, download the FLA for this file here. You will need Flash CS3 or CS4 to edit the FLA.

View at Screenr

Easy peasy huh? I suck at Flash, and seriously this took me less than an hour to build.

Now let’s…

2. Build an ast_remote.swf to load our new custom skin

What is the ast_remote.swf file?  Well, it is a file that the Articulate Presenter loads on launch.  So what I have done is modify this file to load my own custom skin on top of the Articulate Presenter player.

You can download my ast_remote.fla file here to create your own ast_remote.swf.

Once you download it, the only thing you will want to change is this line:

loadMovieNum (“player/custom_player.swf”, 100);

Change the custom_player.swf to point to your custom skin.  So for example, with my skin the line looks like this:

loadMovieNum (“player/API_Tester.swf”, 100);

What does all the other code do in the ast_remote.swf file do?  The other code in the file makes sure that your custom skin is loaded before the rest of the player, so that you won’t ever see the regular Articulate Presenter player.

So now that we have created our skin, modified the ast_remote, it is time to…

3. Package our skin in a format that can be easily installed.

One of the cool things we added in Articulate Presenter ’09 Update 5 is the ability to create and install custom skin packages.  What is an Articulate Presenter custom skin package?  Check out this screencast for an explanation.

View at Screenr

So now let’s get to creating our Articulate Presenter Skin Package…

Download my Blog Player.artpkg file here so you can follow along.

View at Screenr

Did I go too fast in my explanation of what the .ARTPKG file contains?  If I did no sweat, here is a recap of what it should contain:

• ast_remote.swf
• your custom skin.swf
• Any other files you want to contain
• **<templatename>.xml should be a template configured to match the requirements of the template needed. Remember to set the <communityplayer> tag to “true”.
• Package.xml – the XML that describes the package

And the package.xml should contain the following:

• uniqueID – (a GUID) that identifies the player (create a GUID here).
• content title –  the name of your template
• version - the version of your player
• presenterTemplate – the player template that is included in your package
• playerFiles – List of all files you want included when a presentation is published with your skin

** To create my template.xml file this is what I did:

1. Started PowerPoint
2. Went to Articulate>Player Templates
3. Added/Removed options that I wanted included in my Player Template
4. Select File>Save As…
5. Navigated to the folder that template was saved:
   (WINXP: C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\templates\ )
   (WIN7/VISTA: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\templates )
6. Added that template.xml file to my .artpkg

That is it, you have now developed your own Articulate Presenter skin

More info…

Get the Articulate Presenter SDK

In order to build your community skin you will probably want all the SDK documentation.  You can purchase the Articulate Presenter SDK from our store here or if you are an Articulate PMP customer you get access to it for free by contacting our support department here.

If you want to see everything that is possible to do in the SDK you can find the sample documentation here.

Get help developing your custom skin

Need help developing your skin?  Send a support request asking for access to the Articulate SDK forum here. This is a special forum setup for people with questions related to the SDK.  If you want you can also post questions in the comments here, but I suck at Flash, so if you have Flash related questions I might direct you to the forum.

Got a pimped out skin you want Articulate to see?

Awesome, we would love to see it.  Upload it here so we can check it out.

Having trouble finding all files referenced in this post?

No worries, you can download all files referenced here:

• My blog player FLA file
• ast_remote.fla
• Blog Player.artpkg

Want a custom skin, but suck at Flash worse than I do?

So you want a custom skin, but you don’t know or have Flash at all?  I can recommend a couple of people who have made some pretty sweet custom skins.

• Articulate MVP James Kinglsey – developed this sweet skin here for a customer of his, and he can build you an entirely custom skin for a price.
• e-Mersion – has built many custom skins, and even gives one away for free.  You can find out about all the services they offer here.

Note: Articulate Presenter ’09 currently supports ActionScript 2.0.  In the next version we do of Articulate Presenter we will be migrating our content to ActionScript 3, so players you develop for Articulate Studio ’09 will not work in future versions.  Just thought I would give you a heads up.

Way back in middle school my friend Ethan faced a really challenging problem.  See Ethan’s mom had a membership to Sam’s Club, and always did the shopping for the family.  Well, one day his mom went to Sam’s club and purchased a huge 1 gallon jug of peanut butter for the family.  The problem was it was CREAMY peanut butter and Ethan (like many people) hated creamy peanut butter.

Ethan voices his displeasure with the creamy peanut butter purchase

Ethan being really displeased with the purchase let his mother know that he wasn’t about to eat that creamy peanut butter and asked his mother to get him chunky Peanut Butter instead.  Well, after Ethan’s mom just bought a gallon of creamy peanut butter, she was not about to go buy MORE peanut butter.

Faced with this problem Ethan could have done many things…he could have refused to eat the peanut butter until his mom corrected the problem, he could have sabotaged the peanut butter, and he could have gone out and bought chunky peanut butter himself.  None of these solutions would have made both him AND his mom happy.

So what did Ethan do?

Ethan was smart enough to think outside the box and come up with a solution to the problem that made both him and his mom happy.  He was able to stick to his principles and not eat creamy peanut butter, and make his mom happy by not wasting all that peanut butter…Ethan bought peanuts to convert the creamy peanut butter to chunky peanut butter. Ethan ran to the store, picked up a pound of peanuts, crushed them up, and fixed the peanut butter.

So the next time life gives you creamy peanut butter, be like Ethan and make it chunky.

You can follow Ethan on twitter here (@ethang).