So today I went to class as a 2nd year uni student. I walked in, sat down and logged on to an iMac desktop computer. It didn’t take long to realise that the good old Mighty Mouse didn’t have right click. That’s okay, only a slight annoyance, I know how to work a MAC holding control every time you want to right click. Anyway, the teacher is trying to download Quicktime Pro on her laptop and doesn’t realise that the projector is already on and that Quicktime Pro is a paid program so no matter how many times she googles for “Quicktime Pro download mac osx” there’s a good chance that the uni has blocked all crack/warez sites.

This gives me an indication of what to expect… not a great deal, but that’s okay. It’s the first tutorial so everyone has to get familiar with the MACs and stuff. She explains that in todays lesson we’ll capture an image and apply an effect using Photo Booth. Then we’ll add some text using Photoshop and finally import the image into a html file. Luckily tutorials allow for two hours to complete this task.

Now I have to admit that using Photo Booth was impressive, there are multiple effects that you can easily apply to your image which is taken from the inbuilt web camera inside the mac. I was also impressed with the quality of the camera. It was outputting a fairly crisp 640×480 image. Photo Booth can also record video with effects. So within a few clicks I had saved various images with the built in effects.

Then we moved onto Photoshop. We were shown the clone tool, healing brush and the inbuilt filter gallery. Advised to add some text and change the colours around. Then we had a lecture on saving files. I can’t believe people still don’t understand where to save their files to… Like hasn’t everyone else in this class used a computer before? Next we move onto Dreamweaver.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, than the basics of Dreamweaver aren’t that hard to grasp. Basically you can type text, change colours and insert images. OMG wow! So my stuff is arranged all messy, how do I organise it? We were taught to insert a TABLE and make things fit inside the rows and columns. FFS tables were out of fashion when I was doing TAFE 4 years ago. Why don’t these courses just teach what is now a standard in the web design industry from the start? Yes, I’m talking about CSS.

So after all that I ended up with this awesome website which made me feel like I was in primary school again.