I've finally managed to get the video I took of my session on Best Practices & Architecture for Flash & Flash Media Server 2.0 that I did at MAX Korea 2005. I did have two other versions, one from Singapore and one from Hong Kong, but the Korea one seemed best because we had over an hour for our sessions, whereas the others were one hour or less. So there is more content in this one.
The video is Flash 8 streamed from FMS2 with the captions put in for the whole video with Captionate 2.0. I've got to say that this app rules! It's a serious pain to get all the captions (took me 4 hours for 1 hour of video to type them all out), but once you have them, Captionate just makes it easy to embed in the FLV file and in turn integrate into the our Flash application.
Anyways, I have one more video I want to get up, Testing for Security Holes in Flash and Flash Media Server which I have captured but just need to edit. The one I am using is from the Hong Kong MAX conference. It shouldn't take me too much longer, but I am doing it only in my spare time.. which I'm lacking more and more of lately. Either way, I expect to have it up next week at the latest.
Here is the link again to the presentation files just in case.
And the session details:
Best Practices for Development and Architecture for Flash Media Server
I'd have to say honestly that I dread doing docs for the work we do. Help docs, demo docs, tutorials aren't so bad really.. but when I hear the word docs I get this uncontrollable feeling inside to ... sleep, or go surf the net or something else other than create them.
We recently had a project to build a slightly complex component with FMX2004 and the client required documents for it. Usage, overview etc.. I didn't have the job of writing them from scratch (thank god) but I did have to translate them over to Japanese and then get them into the Flash help panel. Even though it's not really the meat of the job it's most definitely one of the most uninteresting and seems to take the longest.. not sure why.. it's all relative I guess.
Another project that we have going is a support application that runs off of FCS and it required an up-to-dating of the demos.. damn.. that's my job now.. so here goes I say. I'll finish it up all today.. (uh.. yeah.. right) - capture screen.. type some stuff, crop, put in shadow etc.. *sigh* ::start surfing engadget or something::
Lucky for me though I've got MM's new Captivate on my side and I decide to have a go at it even though I've got such a short time frame to work in. Funny thing about this.., here I was thinking that it would take me longer to get things together but in reality it took.. hmm.. I would say about 1/10th of the amount of time if I had gone to build them from scratch. I showed them around a bit and people were like "whoa dude.. you finished those in how much time??" Which is a bit of a cool feeling I guess :D
If you are curious as to how they turned out, here they are here:
View the administrator application here, and the representative application here. I'm pretty happy with them so far. Though do plan on changing up a few things to make them a bit more attractive to the eye.. template etc..
I don't have the hang of it all just yet, still learning but it's not hard and it's just a matter of practice and playing. I managed to get a bit of good advice from the Captivate product manager, Silke, which kinda made me look at things in a bit of a different light. So here's hoping that I'll continue to improve and I'll see about getting some more tutes up here with it. Not sure if I'll be as energetic as Jesse :D but let's see how it goes.
All I know now is that I didn't surf once while making those. If you haven't messed with Captivate yet, give it a shot. Suddenly making docs and e-learning material isn't so bad. (or that's what I think..)