News

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.

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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…)

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?

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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.

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If you’ve attended our Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign courses, you’ll know that Gary loves to pass on his expert knowledge of the Creative Suite in the lab. He also likes to share tips through these posts. Here’s  the latest for you - this  time the subject is InDesign.

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There’s been a roar of publicity about the new Mac OSX 10.7 Lion release.  We want to offer the Lion 101 and 201 certification training as soon as possible. The new courses have been published by Apple, and our  trainers are now able to start the process of re-certifying for Lion 101 and 201 course delivery, so they’re busy doing that at the moment.  Based on current information, we’ve scheduled our first Lion 101 course for 7th - 9th December. If  you want to be one of the first to be certified on Lion OSX,  you can book now.

Lion 201 course content  is almost entirely new, and will be three days long instead of four.  Dates coming soon. Register below if you want to be advised of these directly.

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…)

Such is the reputation of Dr Stallman that over 200 people came along to this event on 23^rd 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.

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Here’s a date for your diary.   PHP NW 2011, the annual conference for PHP developers in Manchester, returns for the fourth year on   8th and 9th October.

This year we’re pleased to be sponsoring the Tutorial Day, on 7th October. We were really impressed by the line-up and the idea of the extra day of training, where conference attendees can  spend quality time with some of the conference speakers - including our own Leeds expert Zend PHP trainer Lorna Mitchell.

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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.

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We’re working with leading Ruby expert Peter Cooper to offer this great new course for developers -  Ruby and Rails I : Foundations .  Peter has been programming for as long as he can remember, starting out as a youngster with the BBC Micro. After working with C, Pascal and Perl, he came across Ruby, and Rails in 2004 and was ’smitten’. He now specialises in Ruby,  and Ruby on Rails, sharing his knowledge through training, writing, and blogging. His blog, Ruby Inside, is the most popular blog in the Ruby and Rails space. (more…)

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…)

Thirty people came to Old Broadcasting House on the evening of 22nd February 2011 to find out how to develop an iPhone app from expert developer and trainer Dave Verwer, of Shiny Development. Dave is in great demand worldwide so we’re always pleased to see him back in Leeds to teach the iPhone apps development course

The evening started with Dave presenting to the audience who’d all brought along their Macbooks with the SDK installed. Some had been caught out by the time it had taken to download the SDK - it’s huge! Dave’s talk started with a general overview of the development process and the environment,  then moved on to  building an app. Everyone then had the opportunity to develop an app for themselves (Blue-Peter style) with  Dave on hand to answer questions. Old Broadcasting House coworker, apps developer  Tim Medcalf also helped out, which meant that everyone was able to make good progress. (more…)

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.

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