A couple of follow-ups to things mentioned here lately. First, thanks to the folks at TechSmith, I'm trying out a copy of Camtasia Studio. I've used it to update the LibraryLookup page to include Flash versions of the Windows Media screen videos I made. You can do a lot more with Camtasia Studio than just convert formats, of course. It's a complete solution for capturing screen videos, and editing video and audio clips on a timeline.
I can appreciate the desire to turn efficient screen narratives into a commodity which escapes any pricing, but I haven't seen anyone donate their days to the world like that yet. [JD on MX]An excellent point. To reiterate, I would like to draw a sharp distinction between amateur and professional screen videos. The ones I've done are strictly amateur. What I'm proposing is that the software industry as a whole would benefit if users could easily capture and publish amateur screen videos. These would lack the production values you'd expect in a professionally-done demo or training video, but would suffice for user-to-user communication (teaching one another how stuff works) and for user-to-developer communication (illustrating what doesn't work). These folks don't need and won't buy professional screen-video production tools. Conversely the producers of demos and training videos do need and will buy such tools.
In other news, I've been having a ball writing queries for the XPath search page. For example: titles of December 2003 items; December 2003 items containing QuickTime movies.
I've cleaned up my earlier entries well enough to include them, but the complete archive -- 832 entries in a 2.4MB XML file -- is more than libxslt can deal with. A version of this solution based on Berkeley DB XML is waiting in the wings, though, and I hope to deploy it sometime next week.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/01/18.html#a889