Blog
January’s Round-Up
Welcome to our first newsletter of 2012. We’ve some great new courses to help get your skills in shape and tempting events to brighten up your January.
New Specialist PHP Workshops for Developers
PHP developers - make it your new year resolution to take these three new high-impact one-day workshops.
Spend time with experienced industry professional Lorna Mitchell and learn first-hand the best-practice approaches, tools, tips and productivity boosters recommended by the expert. As an added bonus ask specific questions related to your own working environment within this lab setting.
You’ll gain specialist skills and resources which enhance your own expertise and open doors for you to take your own development further, beyond the course itself. (more…)
Publishing to the iPad using InDesign
Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) is a subscription service that enables InDesign users to create, prototype, and publish content to the Apple iTunes store. On its initial release Adobe pitched this as a service for large publishing houses to utilise, In October 2011, Adobe announced the “Single Edition” version of the Digital Publishing Suite bringing the costs of publishing to the iPad within the reach of businesses of all sizes with a cost of £250 per application. Could your publication join the iPad publications of Wired, Vogue and The Guardian?
Culture Hack North
This weekend we had the pleasure of hosting a very different type of event that brought some new people to Old Broadcasting House as well as some old friends as the first Culture Hack North took place. The brainchild of Ash Mann, Digital Manager at Opera North, in partnership with Dom Hodgson, who runs Leeds Hack and many other things too, the objective was simple: unlock data from leading Northern cultural organisations and make it available to hackers - designers and developers - and see what amazing things result from 24 hours of hacking.
A taste of iPhone Apps Development at Leeds Hack
We were really pleased to be asked by our old friend Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson to sponsor the second Leeds Hack. Running on 6-7 August at the swish Mint Hotel in the city centre, this 24 hour hackathon brought together a huge range of developers from near and far for what was the largest independent hack day in the UK outside of London. But as well as providing a supply of nti Nibbles (”for when your hack is on the crisp of completion….”) we wanted to give the hackers a taste of the kind of things that we do at nti Leeds so we teamed up with iPhone trainer, Dave Verwer, who delivers the nti Leeds iPhone apps development course, to run a taster session before the main event got underway. (more…)
Dr Richard Stallman in Leeds
Such is the reputation of Dr Stallman that over 200 people came along to this event on 23rd August, and a lengthy queue formed afterwards for autographs and photos with this celebrity of the software world, taking us well past the time we had promised Leeds Met’s Rosebowl security team we would be finished.
Funding available for Yorkshire businesses - offer now closed
25/11/2011 All funding from the Skills Enhancement Fund has now ended. In 2010-11 375 businesses accessed this Skills Enhancement Funding, training over 1000 of their employees with nti Leeds.
Finding Reliable, cost-effective visual content for your publications
In the latest post of our occasional series, our Creative Suite expert trainer and designer Gary shares his tips on sourcing visual content.
Over to you Gary….
Whenever we create visual communications material it invariably includes images or graphics of one form or another. It adds visual stimulus, as well as signposting what the audience can expect before they commit to the detail. The pursuit of finding a reliable source for images and graphics however can be both time consuming and costly. Over the last 20 years the methods by which designers and content creators source images have changed beyond recognition. (more…)
Drupal Camp comes to Old Broadcasting House 21st & 22nd May
We’re pleased to be hosting this prestigious weekend event on Saturday the 21st & Sunday the 22nd of May here at Old Broadcasting House.
More Adobe CS5 Goodies
There’s so much great stuff out there on the web to help you, and so little time! So we asked our Creative Suite trainer Gary Bradley to help you by signposting some of his favourites. Here’s the second of his posts on this topic.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 Goodies
Here’s a small selection of tips and tricks for Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator CS5 from leading Adobe gurus, which we thought we’d pass on.
WePublish 22 January 2011- a one day conference for bloggers, journalists…
We’re big fans of Wordpress here at nti Leeds, and all things Open Source. And we know lots of people who create content, prepare news, write blogs, and generally report on what’s going on.
And we love inviting people to Old Broadcasting House so that they can share their experiences, network, collaborate and generally make connections.
That’s why we’re pleased to be sponsoring WePublish on Saturday 22nd January 2010 10:00 til 4:30.
WePublish provides an arena for anyone who creates content, publishes or supports digital publishing.
Whether you are a self-taught blogger or diarist through to a trained, experienced journalist and all the many alternatives between, this unconference style event will take an open and sharing look at subjects such as:
- How is ‘digital’ changing the way we publish?
- Where are ideas got from?
- Moderation
- Staying on the right side of the law
- Getting the right system in place
- Beyond the written word - photography, audio, video and other opportunities
- Beyond blogging - what else can I do with my content and ideas?
- Building and managing audiences
- What do mobile phones, iPads and other new platforms means for me?
- Getting real - using third party printing solutions
- Using social media to best effect
- and much much more…
You can find our more at the WePublish site wepublish.org and book your ticket at wepublish.eventbrite.com
The end of an era
Tuesday 6th July 2010 may have gone unnoticed by many people as just another Tuesday (apologies to those for whom it’s a major anniversary!), but for the development of Digital Britain it was something of a milestone.
This date is when it became officially impossible to buy a new analogue TV set from a UK retailer. With the final analogue TV switch-off scheduled for 2012, clearly the change had to come some time and apparently last month (June) no sale of an analogue TV took place anywhere in the UK. (more…)
Girl Power
We had a two great speakers for last night™s Leeds Girl Geek Dinner at The Loft, which had been planned as part of the Leeds Web Festival LSx09. The weather wasn™t great for the barbecue we had ordered but that didn™t seem to matter too much. For this event fifty guests had bought tickets, again, we had a good cross-section of the Leeds digital and creative scene. It was good to welcome Melissa Sheriff from AQL, and Janine Jacques. We also had some new graduates who came along courtesy of tickets sponsored by Digital 2020 - thanks to Teresa Colley, Tara Hainsworth, Malhia Mahmood and Michelle Lee for coming along, hope you can come to the next one and we wish you the best of luck as you start your exciting adventure into the sector! Through an introduction from Sarah Blow from London GGD, Nick Halstead, founder of TweetMeme came along - he was in Leeds for the Carsonified event the next day.
Write the next great iPhone App
We’re really pleased that our new iPhone Apps developer course is running, starting on 20th July. There’s such a growing interest in mobile apps, and the associated business opportunities, that this seemed a logical development for us to complement our Apple Authorised Curriculum portfolio, and our Open Source for Business Android developer course. Apple don’t currently offer authorised developer curriculum, so we are using materials from About Objects, who have been running their courses in the States for a while now. The course will be delivered by Dave Verwer from Shiny Developments. Dave has developed a number of Apps so is well placed to deliver the course. That’s something that we believe really makes a difference.
The three day course is aimed at people with some programming experience and is priced at £995. The actual language you may have used before is not important. We’ll be using iPod Touches on the course; each delegate will be supplied with one to use during the course.
Its amazing how mobile apps are taking off - the opportunities for business, marketing and personal use are endless, as Apple recently demonstrated by announcing the billionth download from the Apps store. We aim to provide our clients with opportunities to take advantage of these developments by bringing new courses such as this to our centre in Leeds.
Uncovering Thinking Digital
What have I learned at Thinking Digital? There™s a lot here and its only lunchtime on the first day. We arrived yesterday afternoon to attend Thinking Digital University. I got the Techbus up from Old Broadcasting House, which was great fun. This was a seriously well-equipped bus “ wireless, coffee, kitchen with fridge and sink, TV and best of all great company. (more…)
Opportunities for New Graduates to beat the recession
We’ve just heard that the NTI has been successful in our bid, submited in January, in response to a call from the Higher Education Funding Council for Universities propose how they could contribute to finding ways to support groups affected by the downturn. (more…)
Ada Lovelace Day post
For Ada Lovelace Day the subject of my blog post is Lynette Willoughby.
I met Lynette in 1992. It was my first day in a new job and I as feeling pretty unsure of myself. The first person I met that day was Lynette. She took me for coffee and that was the beginning of our friendship. She is an amazing person, a true friend. She helped me get to grips with my new job as a university lecturer, passing on her experience, offering moral support and encouragement, as well as sharing her expertise in teaching computing.
Think Visibility
I spent Saturday 7th March back at the office, so to speak, when nti Leeds sponsored Think Visibility here at Old Broadcasting House. This conference was organised by one of our coworkers, Dominic Hodgson, aka ‘The Hodge’. Dom is very much into SEO and had managed to gather some top names in the key specialist area of increasing visibility for this innovative conference. (more…)
Innovator 09 Awards - Flying the Flag for Digital
Geoff Gifford and I attended the Innovator ‘09 awards at Leeds Town Hall on Thursday 5th March 2009. We were pretty excited/nervous/pleased to be shortlisted in the Innovation Catalyst award for our coworking space here at Old Broadcasting House. Surprisingly the digital sector wasn’t well represented as from what we can gather it was just NTI Leeds that made the shortlist in any of the categories. This doesn’t represent the true picture of what’s happening in our region in the digital area. Maybe people are not applying as they are just too busy innovating and working on getting business to fill out the application. (more…)