Give me back my Amiga 500+

At the start of this week we learnt how to use Adobe PageMaker, a rather basic but useful page editing software. I found this to be rather easy, as many of the controls were similar to the ones found in Adobe Photoshop. I found it reassuring that the Adobe packages all contain the same basic controls, so I am fairly confident that I will be able to use the other packages on the course to a high standard.

PageMaker reminded me of Pagesetter, a word processing program for the Amiga. It reminded me of how software has evolved from the days of 2mb of RAM and entire programs contained on a floppy disk.

During self study this week I found it easier to produce creative work on my own than essay work. I think this is because I spent a lot of time on my Art A-level trying out different designs, and doing practical things like making working prototypes of the work I would later create on a larger scale. However, I think that this course requires more planning on the technical side, and this is where I need to improve. I think that this will develop itself, once I have use certain packages and found out what limitations I have to work to.

At the end of the week, I built a PC which I will use for self study for the course. I chose components that would be able to handle large amounts of programs simultaneously, as packages such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver can be very resource heavy, as can running multiple browsers at once. The key components I chose were an Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of GeIL 6400mhz DDR2 RAM and a Gainwald 7900 GS 512mb graphics card.

The dual core processor will allow my computer to run multiple programs at once, such a Dreamweaver and Photoshop. The 2gb of RAM will allow Photoshop to have large amounts of swap file access, which will speed up image processing, and the graphics card will give excellent picture quality through my 21” Dell monitor. I believe that this will make my self study over the next few weeks substantially more enjoyable!