Using the latest version of Aviary’s new Firefox Extension (Talon), users can quickly perform screen capture on select regions or even entire web pages (including content hidden below the fold). Users can capture data to their desktops, clipboards, or even markup and edit the content directly in Aviary’s applications. Download the latest version here!

Open the web page that you want to capture, go to the address bar of the browser and type “aviary.com/” just before the http:// part of the URL.

For instance, if your web address is something like like http://www.invinciblebrain.com, the new URL will become aviary.com/invinciblebrain.com – hit Enter and there you have an editable screenshot image of that page.

Or add this bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar and you can even save yourself from typing aviary.com every time you want to capture a screenshot.

You can save the image to the desktop or further add annotation using the Type Tool, freehand brushes, arrows and other tools available in the Aviary editor. It can’t get easier than this.

And it even works with the Flash videos of YouTube.

Other great features include

Blazing Fast / Instant On
Falcon is under 90k in size, resulting in an instantaneous load time. Anyone that hasAviary’s Firefox extension Talon installed can access and edit screen captured data without any server interaction (it all takes place right within the browser).

Easy Color Extraction
Use the built-in color picker tool to extract web color values from images and screenshots. This is awesome and simple for web designers!

Simple Editable Markup
Draw arrows, edit text, make shapes. Everything is selectable. Move, rotate and resize anything added to the screen. You can even recolor, add outlines and shadows.

Built-in Sharing
Host your file online for easy sharing or download it right to your desktop. You can even easily post it to Twitter and other social sharing services.

Image Preparation Features
Crop, Rotate and Resize your image quickly and easily to prepare it for the web.

Aviary Application Integration
Need more design power? Port your image into 4 different Aviary tools (color editor, advanced image editor, effects editor and vector editor).

Intuitive Interface
Designed for bloggers, the interface is intuitive, quick to use and responsive.

Ideal for Netbook Use
The app resizes perfectly for use in netbooks with small screen resolutions.

Animoto is an easy tool for creating impressive videos out of your boring digital photos in minutes. Just upload your pictures to the Animoto website (or pull them directly from Flickr or Picasa), select a background music to play with your video slideshow, add some text (optional) and you’re done.

The basic version of Animoto is free but it limits you to 30 second video clips that aren’t downloadable though you can upload them to YouTube. You can however sign-up for Animoto using this special link and it will give you the option to create one full length video on Animoto for free.

A full length video can be as long as the duration of the song and you can download the video as well though it’s not in HD format.

Animoto Tips for Better Video

While Animoto makes is super easy for your to create professional looking videos without any preparation, a little bit of planning can make your slideshows look even better. Here are some tips from Animoto:

animoto spotlight 1. When uploading photos to Animoto, always pick photos that have a landscape orientation as portrait photos can sometimes format oddly during the video render process.

2. Animoto will automatically determine the duration of each picture in the video slideshow but if there’re pictures that you really want to emphasize in the video, select the images in the video editor and use the spotlight button.

3. When adding text to your video, always make sure that their pictures on either side of the text slide else your text will lack any moving video in the background.

4. Your choice of music determines the transition speed. If you select a slow classical song, your music video will have slow transitions whereas if you select rock, the transitions will happen fast – go for the latter if you are looking to create MTV style video clips.

5. Animoto consumes around 15-20 images for their 30 second shorts. If you upload more images, they are likely to be discarded in the final video so pick the best shots before starting the render process. For full-length videos, you an upload upto 300 shots but the number of pictures used would really depend on the choice of your music – slow music means less pictures.

6. While most people use Animoto for creating fast slideshows, you can adjust the video speed to 1/2x for a more traditional slideshow.

7. If you want to brand your Animoto slideshows, make sure that the last image in the slideshow is not a photograph but an image of your logo.

In our PHP Forms Lesson we used the post method. This is what the pertinent line of HTML code looked like:
HTML Code Excerpt:

<form action=”process.php” method=”post”>
<select name=”item”>
…
<input name=”quantity” type=”text” />

This HTML code specifies that the form data will be submitted to the “process.php” web page using the POST method. The way that PHP does this is to store all the “posted” values into an associative array called “$_POST”. Be sure to take notice the names of the form data names, as they represent the keys in the “$_POST” associative array.

Now that you know about associative arrays, the PHP code from “process.php” should make a litte more sense.
PHP Code Excerpt:

$quantity = $_POST['quantity'];
$item = $_POST['item'];

The form names are used as the keys in the associative array, so be sure that you never have two input items in your HTML form that have the same name. If you do, then you might see some problems arise.
PHP – GET

As we mentioned before, the alternative to the post method is get. If we were to change our HTML form to the get method, it would look like this:
HTML Code Excerpt:

<form action=”process.php” method=”get”>
<select name=”item”>
…
<input name=”quantity” type=”text” />

The get method is different in that it passes the variables along to the “process.php” web page by appending them onto the end of the URL. The URL, after clicking submit, would have this added on to the end of it:

“?item=##&quantity=##”

The question mark “?” tells the browser that the following items are variables. Now that we changed the method of sending information on “order.html”, we must change the “process.php” code to use the “$_GET” associative array.
PHP Code Excerpt:

$quantity = $_GET['quantity'];
$item = $_GET['item'];

After changing the array name the script will function properly. Using the get method displays the variable information to your visitor, so be sure you are not sending password information or other sensitive items with the get method. You would not want your visitors seeing something they are not supposed to!