Friday, July 29, 2005

My first screencast #

In support of "describing the current state of the Scholar's Box," I've been looking for ways to make "screencasts" of the Scholar's Box. From experience, showing the Scholar's Box has been a much more effective way to get across the goals of the Scholar's Box than a lot of writing. I've been looking at a number of screen recording tools for a while. I tried to make the free CamStudio 2.0 work for me but the application's inability to unload from memory led to a lot of frustrating computer reboots. Since I read that Jon Udell had settled on Camtasia Studio for his screencasts and since the academic price is not totally out of this world, I decided to try Camtasia Studio on a 30-day trial. As a way of jumping into the technology, I threw together an unrehearsed demonstration of some of my early morning computation routines: how I use the tabbed browsing in Firefox to load up my two wikis and two weblogs with one click and then how I run a Python script that I wrote to "flip" my wikis -- that is, to make it easy to emulate the "flip this page" functionality in my Manila weblog. Not a profound subject or a screencast for the ages, but something that I could talk about with ease. I chose not to edit the results this first round but instead jumped right to "producing" the screencast for publishing on the Web as a .swf file. The final .swf file is about 2MB in size. You can take a look at the screencast for yourself. Although I still have a lot to learn in terms of both how to create compelling narration for a screencast (to which i will turn to Udell for guidance) and how to use the many features of Camtasia Studio, I'm really pleased with the results (which are already much better than what I could get out of CamStudio. I'm sold on the screencast concept and the product for making it.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/29/05; 11:38:42 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss