I always encourage my students to blog, so it’s gratifying to see a student take on to blogging. Taking the time to blog is a great way to show the world how passionate you are about your craft. Graphika Studios is a new blog by Darren Terhune who is a current student in the Digital Media Technology program at Malaspina University-College. In his blog he is sharing his learning and class projects with the world - be sure to check them out and contact him about a job (he’ll be looking for work in May)!

8 Types of Bad Creative Critics - which type best represents your current client?

So you like to manage your photos in Windows Explorer? Try out Microsoft Photo Info. It’s a new Window Explorer add-in that allows you to add, change and delete common “metadata” properties for digital photographs. The add-in integrates nicely within Windows Explorer and also provides enhanced tooltips and additional sort properties for your images in Explorer.

Adobe has posted Mike Chamber’s recent presentation of Understanding Apollo E-Seminar. In the presentation Mike covers the core technologies that are supported by Apollo, he demonstrates a sample audio application, and shows you how to create a simple Apollo app.

Web developers should note that Apollo is not just for Flash/Flex content. Apollo will equally embrace web technologies such as XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and AJAX. If you’ve been ignoring this new product simply because you thought it was Flash/Flex based, you should take a serious look and discover how you can transfer your web skills to this exciting new platform.

[Link via Ryan Stewart]

ScaleNine (cool site name by the way) is offering free, high-quality Themes for your Flex 2 apps. There are currently 6 themes in the collection with more coming in the near future.

Ryan Stewart recently Interviewed Mike Downey who is a Senior Product Manager for Adobe Apollo. Apollo is a new product currently in it’s early stages of development that promises to provide a cross-platform desktop runtime capable of combining Flex, Flash, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and AJAX content into stand-alone desktop applications.

Imran Nazar got tired of dual booting his Gentoo Linux with Windows XP, so he figured out a cleaver way to Run a Windows Partition in VMware using an existing Window installation on a native disk partition.

The Amazon Web Services Developer Connection has an 18 minute screencast that will show you how to Set up and Run Amazon EC2 from Windows. EC2 is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud web service. With EC2 you can setup and run your own virtual server for less than $80 per month.

File associations in OSX have always been somewhat of a mystery to me. I have file types that seem to want to open in consistently “random” applications. To fix this behavior is rather easy!

To begin, in Finder select the file that is of a type you want to re-associate. Press the command-i key to open up the file’s Get Info window. Look for a section named “Open with:” and expand it if necessary. Now select the new application from the drop down list of available application. If you would like all files of that type to open up in the same application, simply click the “Change All..” button!

It’s that easy!

I have to admit that I don’t follow the Opera web browser much, but when my colleague Mike Haugland pointed me to his new Opera feature it peaked my interest. Event Streaming to Web Browsers allows you to push DOM events continously from your web server to the visitor’s browser. Opera’s implementation is based on the Server-Sent Events from the WHATWG Web Applications 1.0 specification which makes me wonder how long it might be before we see this in Firefox or Safari. The only downside I can see is that you need to add a non-standard <event-source> element to your page (although we could use a custom DTD to get around this).