Paul Howard

creating screencasts in linux

Posted by Paul Howard - 26/02/08 at 03:02:43 pm

Have you ever had to create a screencast while using Linux?

What I thought was going to be the nightmare task of finding usable software to do this actually turned out to be incredibly easy. After a few quick Googles I settled on recordMyDesktop which seemed very lightweight but quite powerful. It did, in fact, capture screencasts and save them in the ogg format. A quick pass through VLC to reencode them and I had them in a format usable for a standard Windows machine to play. This is a far as I could go though. There is no way of adding text or graphics to the screens that you have captured.

A bit more Googling brought me to Wink. Wink is dedicated Tutorial and Presentation creation software and does exactly what I needed. You choose which window or area of the screen to capture, and away you go. Once captured you are free to edit the screencast, add titles, pause the show to add back/next buttons, or just add titles to the whole screencast.

Output formats are flash (.swf) or standalone .exe for windows users. I think you can publish to other formats too but haven’t had time to look through all the options just yet.

Learning how to use it took less than twenty minutes and within an hour I had my first screencast all saved, edited and published to some users to test.

Overall a very impressive bit of free software.

parallels - unfair practices (possibly)

Posted by Paul Howard - 23/02/08 at 10:02:00 pm

I was looking at purchasing a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac today. I had used the 30 day test version and it appeared to fit my needs.

Before purchasing I emailed a couple of questions to their pre-sales team. If I am right, they have some very strange agreements for people to accept.

If I am wrong then all is fine. If not it’s VMware fusion for me.

tagging problems pretty much solved

Posted by Paul Howard - 20/02/08 at 08:02:26 pm

A few days ago I posted saying that I was in two minds about local tagging as the tags didn’t get copied up to various online services.

Well, today I noticed that an updated Picasa Uploader that was released last October now adds the ability for you to duplicate iPhoto tags (or keywords as they call them) into Picasa Web Albums.

I tested it out and it works very well. Nice one Google.

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