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A comment on Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful?.

Re:Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful? by Asa-Nisse on Saturday December 05, 2009 @11:31AM (#978195)
No. There is no way to appreciate the information communicated because I cannot take it in at my own tempo (faster / slower). It's hard too see whats going on in the cast. More important it eats my time unneccessarily.

I much more prefer screenshots with loads of text.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful? by russell on Saturday December 05, 2009 @12:16PM (#978264)
Agreed. Screencasts are linear at the presenters pace. Documentation can be skimmed or probed randomly. Often I dive deep to see how a particular issue is handled.

All too often screencast production qualities are terrible: lighting sucks, the cameraman focuses on the wrong things, the pacing is wrong...

Developers are readers. It's mostly what we do: code, documentation, logs, stack traces. We are a pretty literate bunch. OTOH a video of a new tool would be more useful for a mechanic than the usual postcard description.

That being said, good graphics help a lot. I found the Wikipedia sort demos wonderful.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful? by davidw on Saturday December 05, 2009 @11:34AM (#978205)
I agree - I can't grep screencasts, so while they may be sort of useful once, after that they're just annoying. In terms of information/byte, they are vastly inferior to screenshots + well written documentation.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful? by jammus on Saturday December 05, 2009 @12:06PM (#978252)
Agreed. Also, audio can be quite intrusive meaning that you then have to find an appropriate time to view them.
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Re:Ask HN: Do you find developer screencasts useful? by bhousel on Sunday December 06, 2009 @11:50AM (#979760)
Actually in QuickTime player (not sure about others) you can adjust the playback speed. Command-K will bring up A/V controls and you can speed or slow it without affecting pitch.

I use this trick often when watching developer screencasts.

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