Letexa Blog

This 9m:27s screencast shows you an installation of Fedora 8 Linux as guest system inside a VMware virtual machine. This includes the demonstration of the installation and setup of the VMware tools package in the installed system.

I used Techsmith’s Camtasia for recording the screencast. There was some difficulty, but in their user-to-user support forums some of their engineers keep a watch - and helped me out by spending a few hours on my problem and giving me an easy to use workaround for it. Very nice, no one at Adobe would do this for Captivate. Still, something as simple as a screencast can be a major headache. I was unable to include the audio in the screencast Flash itself, because that produced lots of strange (audible) audio errors. I also couldn’t save it as “video” (.avi or .flv) since this either requires the user to have the Techsmith codec installed, or I’d have to use a video codec designed for “normal” video and not lossless screen capture - with horrible consequences for quality (try watching screencasts on Youtube). Besides, the Flash format is even better than the best screencast-optimized codec (so far?), the resulting file is much smaller than the video file.

So now I load the loader, which loads the screencast Flash .swf file, and only then lets you start the screencast. I would have preferred to let you (the user) start right away, after all, Flash is a streaming format and what better content is their to stream then a completely linear screencast? But I decided to program it to wait until all is loaded - sorry. That’s because I already stream the audio, which as I said I could not include in the screencast file, and I don’t want to have TWO streams (screencast video and the audio) in parallel, both taking up bandwidth and maybe not in sync… So users just have to wait for the 12.8MB to load. Could be worse.

Mörre

There is a new course and a homepage update. The new course is About the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). I’m not quite satisfied with any of my courses, but I think for quite a few people this is still going to be interesting.

Mörre

I added two screencasts:

• Adding an Outgoing Email Server (Thunderbird)
• Adding a new Email Account (Thunderbird)

Mörre

Two new screencasts for Thunderbird.

1. Adding a USENET account
2. Adding RSS feeds

http://letexa.com/courses/9/

If you program in Flash and are interested in building an image viewer or a print preview dialog, this courselet might be for you. It is the first example of interactivity in a Letexa course.

Mörre

http://letexa.com/courses/8/

It is the first version of this courselet. It is not complete, contains errors and problems, and still could be MUCH improved. It took a lot of effort to get even to this point…

Mörre

Today I added a new item I worked on the last two weeks. It’s a commercial product presentation, but the product is an open source product and can be downloaded from the company freely. Also, by paying me they allowed me to improve my course interface flash actionscript code - I used the same framework for their presentation which I’m using for Letexa courses.

Right now I’m working on more Mozilla Thunderbird course content, I just started developing a n interactive multimedia help for the options dialog. You’ll be able to use the simulation of that dialog as if it was within Thunderbird and get explanations for all items.

Mörre

Small changes in the Flash of the “About Email” courselet posted yesterday for more operational consistency, no change in contents. Used the same courselet framework for also extracting About News and About RSS from the ill-fated large Thunderbird course. This road looks promising, I’ll keep riding it… i.e. I’ll release such small pieces and stop working on the large one - the amount of course contents I am going to create will be the same but it will be much more shareable, manageable, viewable etc.

Mörre

Today I uploaded an updated version of course #1 for Mozilla Thunderbird. Now section “Basic Setup” has been updated and now has contents in section Background Information “About News”, not just in “About Email”. All others are still empty. Please note that navigation within these two audio-supported parts still does not work. You may scroll within the audio, but the screenplay won’t be in sync then, unless you get to the next audio “cue point event” when the screen will be synchronized with what’s playing again. Working on it - only a simple matter…

Update 8 July: Small design updates to this first course (e.g. to the nav buttons, make them simpler); volume bar works now.

Update 9 July: Play controls work (seeking, forward, back); Added a “return” button to the still empty menu points (only “Installation” and “Basic Setup” of the Thunderbird course have contents thus far), until now you where stuck if you navigated there.

Update 10 July (very late 9 July, really): Added “Basic Configuration” -> “Background Information” -> “About RSS” section. I found navigation does not work relliably - because I use gotoAndPlay (Actionscript 2.0 code). With gotoAndStop it would work. This is because I have a frame-by-frame setup, with stepping forward triggered by the video/audio file (”cuepoints”). I found if I add one more (non-key)frame for each of those frames it works, have to do that or find another workaround. Flash is full of surprises and unexpected behavior…

Update 10 July: Now navigation should *really* work.

Although it seems nothing has been going on since January, that’s not true! I kept silent on the website only because I switched to a different technology - all Flash - and had to start from scratch programming a player framework to put the course into.

Yesterday I put the first course online. It is still under development, but this is the first time I have something more than this blog to show!

Under http://letexa.com/courses/1/ you can find this course. As of posting time, only the first two items “Installation” and “Basic Configuration” have contents. The more interesting one - with sound already - is under “Basic Configuration” -> “Background Information”. The playback controls (forward/back/seek) don’t fully work yet, but you can use the seekbar to go to the end of the audio to go to the end if you don’t want to wait the full 6 minutes!
Development is progressing much faster now, since I finally have the framework in place. I decided to go all-Flash - for many reasons. In a much later stage I would like to have course contents and course behavior separated (as I said in previous posts here, read there), and then any player could be programmed to show the actual course. This way we’d be independent of Flash, but for know that’s the only really viable x-platform multimedia technology.

Mörre