Developing Interactive Tutorials for Joomla Sites with WINK

WINK is an excellent free and opensource screen capture program you can use to develop tutorials on software applications or your own website that can be placed easily on Joomla websites. All you need to do is insert some code in an article using the Sourcerer plugin after WINK has rendered the SWF and script files for you.

You can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

Below is an example of a tutorial on using our website. We made the tutorial in less than 20 minutes using WINK for the first time:

Below is a screenshot of the code. Please make sure you replace /.../ in the code with the name of the directory where you have placed the SWF and JS files on the server.

You can copy and paste the code below (in this case the files are in the directory wink):

Enhancing Your Photos with Nikon's CaptureNX and NIK Software's U Point Technology

Photoshop^TM is the favorite photo manipulation program for many web designers. We prefer Capture NX of Nikon with U Point ^TM or Control Point Technology to develop Joomla websites.

If you are not a Nikon user, you may not have heard of Capture NX. The program sometimes ships with new high-end Nikon cameras (it came with our Nikon D300) and can be purchased separately. What makes the software so unique is called U Point ^TM and Control Point Technology. To see the technology, we recommend that you surf to the Nikon Capture NX demonstration site where you can download a free trial version.

Enhancements for hue, brightness and saturation of pictures for your Joomla website are as easy as placing a Color Control Point on photos and by adjusting the length of sliders. You just place a control point in the photo, the sky for example, and the software selects the sky automatically for you (no selection layers and/or masks are needed) and the color can be changed gradually and naturally.

Below is an example of a photo we took in the Netherlands that has been manipulated with U Point ^TM Technology. On the left is the original photo. On the right the photo is manipulated with control points. Please click on the thumbnail for a more detailed view.

The sky, the red lift and the traffic sign in the right photo were changed with just three clicks (we gave the colors a bit of a boost to demonstrate the technology). The objects are selected automatically by the program and all you need to do is slide the controls (visible on the right in the sky). This all can be done in Nikon's NEF RAW format. A plugin with the same technology is also available for Photoshop, Apeture and Lightroom. More information on the plugin can be found on the website of Nik Software, the developer of the technology.

Making a High Quality Screenshot of Your Website

To show your Joomla website to others in forums, on twitter, etc., it is useful to make a screen shot of the site. The problem is that if you use "Print Screen" or the "Snipping Tool" that comes with Windows Vista, you only copy what you see on the screen, not the entire website.

Using a Firefox plugin called "Fireshot", you can easily create a print screen of the entire website. Fireshot also gives you editing and annotation tools and you can save a screen shot in PNG (preferred), GIF, JPEG and BMP.

Below you see two examples of a screen shot of a Joomla website, one with the Snipping Tool and one with the Fireshot plugin.

A screen shot using Snipping Tool - you can only capture what you see on the screen

A screen shot capturing the entire website using Fireshot

The Fireshot plugin is available in the extensions repository of Firefox.