My Wobbly Google Reader Screencast
Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this December 18th, 2006 11:29 am
Well Scott, since you asked for it, a few weeks late, I did a hasty screencast this morning of poking through my Google Reader feeds, not as quickly as D’Arcy did with his use of Blogbridge.
But I did pick up on Dr. Norman’s method, and got me a copy of iShowU which seems to do a nifty job of screen/audio recording on Mac OSX — it does not save as Flash, but I crunched it a bit in QuickTime Pro to knock off some MB weight (for a smaller dimension movie, I switched my screen res to 800×600 and did full screen at that set).
My Google Reader Screencast [10.3 Mb, 6:03]
I am still utterly humbled at the masters of screencasting — it is very much an art to not only get a great recording, but to orchestrate it so as to be interesting, not a fumbling mumbling ramble, or not a snoozer. Maybe next year….
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December 18th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
Nice job! It takes me an embarassing along time to do a screencast - it isn’t necessarily plug and play. I’ve had to resort to hollywood metaphors - write a script, do a storyboard, set up the scene, rehearse the lines, shoot it, edit it, produce it ..
My polished ones are here:
http://bethkanter.wordpress.com/screencast-program-notes/
My quick and dirty collection here:
http://kanter.blip.tv/file/89075/
http://kanter.blip.tv/file/97673/
December 19th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Heya, Alan. good screencast! thanks for sharing it.
iShowU can actually scale as it records. The one I did, I left my display at natural resolution (1280×1024) and set iShowU to record the whole thing, but to scale it by 50% when saving the QuickTime file. Makes it easier to manage without losing real estate, and it’s still readable enough.
There’s also a key combo for starting, pausing, resuming and stopping recording. I forget what it is off the top of my head, but IIRC, they’re exposed in the menu that’s available when your display is set to wider than 800px
December 19th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Hey, thanks for doing this! I know this probably seemed rudimentary, but personally I found it interesting. Looking at the way you are using Google Reader right now, it seems awfully similar to how I use Bloglines except around the read/unread posts feature. I am going to give Reader a second chance but I am still straining to see the advantages. Not so much with BlogBridge, the one D’Arcy demo’d - I can see how using the ratings system can make for a different experience. And I think using Reader with tags might create some differences too. Anyways, I think this screencast will become another small piece in showing new users how to effectively deal with the information tsunami in front of them. Cheers, Scott
December 19th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
I tried the scaling, D’Arcy, it seemed to give me one of those framed areas that scooted around with my mouse, but I did the thing in a one take hurry. Will try again. And it as Command-SHift-S to start and Command-SHift-T to stop. There is also a option that hides the software when you start, so you dont have to edit it out of the movie.
I crunched it through ST pro to cut the file size in half, it knocked the soudn flat, but 20 Mb seemed fat
December 20th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Scott, what if you tag feeds with stars in Reader? you could use “*”, “**”, “***”, “****”, and “*****” to emulate ratings… I occasionally do this in del.icio.us to “rate” my bookmarks. Then, I wonder if you could make a view that showed all items from feeds tagged with each * rating?
Alan, you can turn off follow-mouse, and lock the recording region into place. It’s a checkbox on the settings panel for each preset.
December 22nd, 2006 at 3:23 pm
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