Many vendors claim to save you money. Buyer beware! If you fail to check out the claims, you could end up spending more. Advertisers are paid to make a product appealing; not to provide all the facts to support the claims being made. Consumers need to evaluate advertised claims to make an informed decision that results in true cost savings. Saving money is influenced by the availability of like products for comparisons, the local economy and time. To see how long will it take to see a cost savings you need to conduct a cost analysis.

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I’m not a fan of calling a client to tell them that their project is either going to take longer and/or cost them more money due to unforeseen circumstances. It’s only been on very rare occasions that the circumstances are a result of my ineptitude due to poor estimation of time or costs associated with the job. How you prevent making these types of calls comes from being as clear as possible with them and making sure that they’re as clear as possible with you. Even details that seem insignificant can end up being a bigger problem that you could have imagined and result in costing your client a lot more than you thought it would. Being able to prevent these problems before they ever emerge can make the difference between being known as a person or company that is open and honest with a client or one that constantly forces their clients to pay them additional money.

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In Captivate 6, Adobe introduced quiz remediation. If a user does not answer a question correctly it gives them a chance to go back and review the content of a training before attempting to answer the question again. The downside of how remediation functions in Captivate is that any question using remediation falls into an endless success-only loop. No matter how many times the user answers the question incorrectly; Captivate’s remediation doesn’t have a way of allowing failure so the only way for the user to move past the question is to answer it correctly. This post introduces a simple workaround to use remediation and allow the user to fail the question.

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The Windows feature of showing icons on thumbnails should be a no-brainer. When you view the thumbnails of files in Windows explorer, an icon of the file type should show in the lower right corner of the thumbnail. Granted, this would only be true of files that allow a thumbnail view such as images and videos, but the default implementation of it only works for videos. The icon is then only associated with the program set as the default for handling the file type and not an icon that shows you what the file type actually is. With a quick registry setting, you can modify any file type so that it shows a custom icon over the thumbnail, for files that allow thumbnails, regardless of the application that opens the file.

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On May 6, Adobe announced that they are eliminating their retail-purchasing model for the Creative Suite applications in favor of a new subscription based model. As this may make the applications more affordable for people that are new users to the software, it’s an expensive disaster for anyone that already has any of the Creative Suite software or bundles.

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