Saturday, April 12, 2008

Shorter Screencasts

Hello,
I've finally improved my screencast recording environment. I've receive my USB headset (which scared me by not working out of the box) and bought myself a license of iShowU. I've also created a 'screencast' user on my laptop which has 800x600 screen resolution, a big mouse and much less polution on its environment.
While trying to record the english version of my last screencast (Blocks, Conditionals and Loops), I've realized that long screencasts are hell. If I made a mistake by the end of the screencast, I was loosing 15 mins because editing videos makes nasty interruptions I hate. So if I keep screencasts shorter, I waiste less time with my mistakes, people get less bored over time with it and I can record them more frequently.

In order to keep things in line, I decided also to release the English and Portuguese version of the screencasts at the same time so both can make suggestions and ask for help about the same topic. In order to have this going well, I restarted the portuguese series to the point where I started about Smalltalk (not talking about Morphic). So I now present the Transcript and the Workspace tools available on Squeak and teach how to use them to write code and see its result. I also teach how to concatenate strings on Smalltalk and how to declare variables. I hope to release another screencast in 3 or 4 days abording Conditionals. You can download the image of Squeak I used under: http://squeak.ofset.org/squeak-dev/.
Meanwhile, enjoy the screencasts.

Download the English version here, or see it on Google Video.
Download the Portuguese version here, or see it on Google Video.

Removed the option to see the video in this page since it was too little and crappy quality. I hope you enjoy it. Bye bye!

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