Tag: Software

Posted on

Blackboard, A College Student’s Best Friend

Blackboard is a college student’s best friend. If you’re in college and you don’t know what I’m talking about, I feel for you. Blackboard is the best thing to happen in keeping up to date with assignments and grades.

For all of you who don’t know about Blackboard, it is a website which professors can use to post anything they want from class schedule changes, to upcoming assignments you need to prepare for. They also can post your grades online in this secure environment. My teachers only posted grades from my tests and online projects. I loved this feature because I would then communicate with my teacher, if I didn’t do so well. I would ask questions and find out what I needed to work on, and they could help me without ever having to meet up after class.

Another useful feature of Blackboard is that it has integrated email. This is useful if you don’t know your teacher’s school email address.  You can just use Blackboard and they will get the message in their in box. Also you can communicate with all the other students from the class to start study groups or ask questions for peer assistance.

I found Blackboard to be very useful and wished more of my teachers used it because it got a little bit annoying when some teachers would be so kind as to post things online and others did not. So, if you forgot something you could always just check online. But with the old fashioned teachers you don’t have this luxury, you have to go ask them next time you have class, and if it just wasn’t your day perhaps next class is when the assignment was due. Yikes!

Posted on

Grand Theft Auto 4, Is It Appropriate For Kids?

Grand Theft Auto 4 is a fun game if you’re the right age. Most parents care if their children are playing games with violence, sex, cursing, and drugs so I feel it is good idea to let people know that Grand Theft Auto 4 has all of these aspects.

These aspects do not occasionally pop up, but are present at all times in the game – they are inescapable. In the game, you are a Russian mobster that has many jobs, from selling drugs to being a hit man. Your player does refuse to use drugs when presented, but he does sell drugs to others. When you are walking the streets you can kill any civilian or steal any car. The game also encourages you to kill police officers.

Grand Theft Auto 4 also allows you to get drunk, fall over, and have all the effects of real drinking including the ability to drive while drunk. As in real life, the effects of drinking impair your driving skills. You automatically swerve and hit people walking on the sidewalks.

I do not feel that video games affect children’s actions adversely although some people may disagree, as when I was a child I would play games with these themes. I never had the impulse to go kill anyone or do drugs. But, I do understand that if a parent feels that a game will influence their child they should know about the game before they buy it or allow it to be played.

I would strongly caution parents to play this game before their children do just to be sure that they know what is going on first.

Posted on

Why You Should Consider iTunes

If you are thinking why should I use iTunes I don’t have an iPod or a Mac. Well think again, I happen to love iTunes. It is a great way to keep track of your music and have it perfectly organized. iTunes also gives you a way to buy music straight from the iTunes menu and the songs from iTunes are cheap; only about 99 cents each.

Not only does iTunes allow you to store your music, but it also stores your videos and TV shows, if you have any. If not, you can buy them through the iTunes store.

I never use Windows Media Player anymore since I downloaded iTunes. I like the ability to create libraries from my main music page. I don’t have to go find my music folder and pick the songs out of the folder. This is good, since I name the songs differently on iTunes. For me, I put the artist in front of the song title. I do this because not all songs I find have the artist’s name encoded into the mp3. This just helps with categorizing for organization of my music.

Posted on

Adobe Air, What Is It?

Adobe Air is an application that allows for the viewing of the integration of multi media like Flash, Ajax and other applications with data, but on your desktop and not tied to your browser and works on multiple operating systems.

Just like a Flash plug-in an Adobe Air plug-in is needed to view applications built using Adobe Flex.  Although it is hard to wrap your head around exactly how Adobe Air is different from things like Flash or Shockwave, the big difference is that Adobe Air allows you to use the technology in free standing downloadable applications that are not tied to a browser. Adobe Air integrates the very best of multi media and interactivity through some of the newest web technologies, but not only the Web now on your desktop.

Although Adobe Air is not a hot property on the Web for browsing consumers at this point, it is a hot property for developers and being used as the backbone for new applications that are in the works.

Here’s a link to the Adobe.com website that showcases one Adobe Air product that was built for NASDAQ that will help you to understand what Adobe Air does. Built with Adobe Flex but played with Adobe Air this new breed of applications is coming and is sure to change the way you view and interact with data online and offline in the very near future.