Hi Jason, Gregg and Arie,
Thanks for your support. In fact I like the idea of getting some interactivity for
viewing/demoing using some animation but I also
agree with the fact that AVI are too weighty for the Job I plan.
I also - a couple of years ago when I began to look at /View - began to study the way
Carl did his presentation but I found the way
some figures were constructed is too much complicated for such a few gain. May be I
will reconsider a second try at this approach
since I would prefer to get anything done using REBOL.
However for the moment I began to structure my TOC and even wrote some preliminary
text - in French since I think a lot better in my
native language than I even write in English - using the Make-DOC-PRO format for
getting quick rendering of the output in a somewhat
interesting dressing. And all of this without much effort - thanks to Carl and Robert
for this.
Eventually I will get back and see if things have evolved but for the moment I plan to
stand firm on my position. When a sufficient
amount of material will have be written, tried and tested then I'll see for what is
the best tool to adopt for getting the tutorial
more attractive. In all cases it could not be worse than now - if I remember.
But I also remember of some nice product named ScreenCam that was signed by Lotus and
designed to run on old Windows machines. Since
I already got it in the past I will probably be able to get it reinstalled and try it
again just to see how much space it will
occupy.
In all cases, continue to explore, test and feed me with your ideas. Already we could
try each one on his side to drive some tests
running some small experiment in an interactive way so that we can show to the user
some kind of animation of all the execution
process - seen from the outside - with variable speed and possibility to stop too.
For example let's see if we could simulate - or let a real small app running - that
can be completely driven by the user ( in a
single direction for that time - forward only) and which would ask some input data
(may be a choice amongst many data options would
be nice too) and display some intermediate results (pre-planned by the creator) or at
least the final results. In fact it's almost
a symbolic debugger for straight programs, that is small programs that don't use too
much dynamic behaviour - to begin with.
And this could be driven by single mouse clicks or keyboard letters as the following
may be:
R - Run with almost normal speed in forward direction (From begin to end)
R/S - to single step - and the user would be abel to define what a step is
- 1 or many lines, a loop,
a breakpoint...
R/R - Run in reverse direction (Would be useful to SINGLE step backward,
display intermediate
contents, enter
corrections and restart forward or backward)
R/T - Run with another input data choice amongst suggested ones
(Don't forget that it's only canned for display - no real user
interaction permitted)
R/I - Run with some internals displayed (Use the M command to indicate
which Word(s) to use for)
M - To mark what content is to be displayed when the run is stopped or when script
is exhausted.
May be we'll come to see a very surprising result at the end.
In fact when I came to REBOL it was precisely to be able to create this kind of tool -
using Parse and creating my own FRENCH
teaching language but for now I am far from my goal. At least it is fun and I learn a
lot of material not even from my REBOL related
readings but also from my exchange with you all. I must recognize that having no real
foundation in Computer Science other than my
readings I somewhat miss some parts of the advanced dialogs but I don't give up yet
... now that my health really seems to feel
better ! I'm like a brand new Gerard reassembled from old pieces ;-)
Regards,
Gerard
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Cunliffe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 11:41 AM
Subject: [REBOL] Re: REBOL DOC for teaching - Some criteria I would like to share
before applying
>
> > Now, my experience is that you can learn a lot in a minimum amount of time
> > this way. It works better than executing "commands" on a one by one basis
> > from a book, since in the video tutorial one can see what is being done.
>
> Great that you are interested in developing along these lines.
> Over-the-shoulder video-type tutorials can be very helpful to many people.
> Unfortunately video ..AVI files are huge and while DVD has opened this up
> enormosly now, it does not solve video's very poor image handling of any
> screenshots or typographics.
>
> A valuable alternative is FlashCast - an editable screen capture and
> annotation tool which generates Macromedia Flash .SWF format files.
> http://www.multidmedia.com/software/flashcast/
>
> Pros-- This results in much smaller file sizes, screen captures are which
> very crisp and legible. In addition extra annotation including tutorial
> voice-overs can be recorded and/or loaded. Further interactivity can be
> added using additional Flash programming techniques and tools. FlashCast can
> create standalone executables or can be embedded immediately in web pages.
>
> Cons -- FlashCast itself is Windows only at this time, though the SWF output
> is cross-platform [Win, Mac, Linux]. Also it is a commercial third party
> app. The price seems pretty reasonable at $120 with no restrictions. [30 day
> Free trial download available].
>
> - Jason
>
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