Purpose

As Plasma uses quite a different approach to handle the desktop, although there are similarities with the "old paradigm", the best way to show the new features is to use a visual method, that is, a screencast. Such screencasts should be put somewhere, even on kde.org or the Plasma FAQ, to provide easy to understand example of Plasma usage.

The purpose of the class would be to have people create screencasts to show off various Plasma features by recording a video appropriately. Assistance will be provided with regards of recordmydesktop usage.

Requirements

• KDE 4.2 Beta 2 or later
• recordmydesktop installed

List of screencasts

Students will start with screencasts that are not available yet, i.e. those which show features "not documented" yet. Here's a list:

• Desktop settings (activity name and type)
• Zooming User Interface (adding and removing activities, different ways of cycling through them)
• Panels 101 (adding, moving, resizing, auto-hiding and advanced features)
• Interacting with applets (moving, resizing, from-to panel movement)
• External appplet support (Google Gadgets, Mac OS X Dashboard widgets)

Showing off those features would lead in turn to get them used, increasing the chance of useful bug reports submitted.

In practice

Students will pick an item from the list and will produce a screencast with regards to their chosen topic. I will provide guidance in recording and giving suggestions on how to highlight the various topics. Videos will be kept in OGG format and uploaded to blip.tv, which keeps both the Free and non-Free format.

How to record a screencast

You will need, as per requirements, the recordmydesktop program installed. Your distribution will most likely have packaged it, so you should be able to install it using your distro's package manager.
To start recording, invoke it from the terminal with

Code: Select all

recordmydesktop --no-sound -o your-file-name.ogg


Chances are you don't want to show the terminal when you start (recording will start immediately), so something like this will do the trick:

Code: Select all

recordmydesktop --no-sound --delay 3 -o your-file-name.ogg

This will delay the start by 3 seconds, so you can minimize the terminal out of the way. To stop recording, push Ctrl-Alt-S (or Ctrl-C in the terminal), and recordmydesktop will start encoding your performance, writing an OGG file.

You can pause/resume recording using Ctrl-Alt-P. Good if you want to create notes/move windows out of the way.

Bindings can be modified using the --pause-shortcut and --stop-shortcut command line options.

There is also a frontend, called qrecordmydesktop, which provides a GUI for recordmydesktop. Unfortunately not all distributions ship it.

Where to store the saved screencasts

We'll use blip.tv to store screencasts. It has a Flash interface but also offers the Free (OGG) download, which means the best of both worlds. Prefix your video name with the [KDE4.2] tag. Also, use the "kde4.2"tag in the video tags, since that will be used to gather screencasts for the release announcement.

Other tips

• Use a vanilla-like environment: no distro branding, and if possible use the standard Air wallpaper
• To annotate videos, you can use the notes plasmoid with pre-written text you can scroll during the recording
• A good example of screencast, with use of notes and all, is shown on Sebastian Kügler's Dolphin screencast.

Last but not least

Post screencasts as replies to this message. Also, state which screencast are you picking.

I'll take whichever others don't want, I'm fairly comfortable with all except *google gadgets and mac widgets* (I don't want to take that one really)

Pick one you perfer the most (since you're the first!) and let's get the ball rolling!

I will take zooming interfaces, it might teach me something new too! And I'm personally fascinated by it!

For reference (although the ZUI has changed dramatically since the 4.1 days) you can see an older screencast I made on the topic. There I use annotations and stuff but you can just use the notes plasmoid as I wrote in the first post.

ok, I will start working on it in a moment after I get my head around what I want to talk about!

No rush, I expect some back-and-forth to improve things, so I think this klassroom will go for about a week or so, overall.

I will take the panel, if it's still free.
Will start tomorrow in my spare-time.

Regards,
TeaAge.

einar wrote:

• Desktop settings (activity name and type)
• Zooming User Interface (adding and removing activities, different ways of cycling through them)
• Panels 101 (adding, moving, resizing, auto-hiding and advanced features)
• Interacting with applets (moving, resizing, from-to panel movement)
• External appplet support (Google Gadgets, Mac OS X Dashboard widgets)

Other tips

• Use a vanilla-like environment: no distro branding, and if possible use the standard Air wallpaper
• To annotate videos, you can use the notes plasmoid with pre-written text you can scroll during the recording
• A good example of screencast, with use of notes and all, is shown on Sebastian Kügler's Dolphin screencast.

I will take desktop settings;
Does vanilla means default desktop? With one panel and no widgets (only desktop view)?
I'll do the screencast on new activity
And strangely enough I don't have Air wallpaper on my KDE4.2beta. (I have Kubuntu)
Hope this things are not much of a problem...
I can remove the second panel if it's necessary.
Anyway I'll do the desktop settings first...

you can get the air wallpaper from:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase ... ts/images/
(that's what I did)

and I have a slight problem, I added a new activity, and now I can't remove it. "Remove this desktop" in the tool menu (top right hand corner) doesn't work, and the remove button under the activity (when zoomed out) doesn't work either. Is it a bug?[hr]
it works now, that's weird. I changed the main desktop to folderview and it worked!

fengshaun wrote:you can get the air wallpaper from:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase ... ts/images/
(that's what I did)

and I have a slight problem, I added a new activity, and now I can't remove it. "Remove this desktop" in the tool menu (top right hand corner) doesn't work, and the remove button under the activity (when zoomed out) doesn't work either. Is it a bug?[hr]
it works now, that's weird. I changed the main desktop to folderview and it worked!

Edit: I just got the idea why< you can't remove the added activity, because it was the last used, so if you switch to other activity and then zoom out again you should be able to remove it.
I also experience this bug, zoom out and back in, it might work...
Or got to plasmarc and locate view ids and delete the second "string".
It should be something like this:

Code: Select all

3=1
25=2

And thanks for Air tip!

Thanks for the tip! That helps a lot![hr]
ah, --delay is not an option, it's -delay (with one dash)[hr]
So I'm finished with my first try. I was wondering if you could review it to see if I left out anything I should have mentioned! I'll do many more to get it perfect! But I want to be sure that I don't leave out important stuff! But where should I upload it for you to review it einar?

Why does strange things always strange things happen to me?
First my krecordmydesktop encodes files in ogv instead of ogg, even if I specify.
Second what's the FPS that I have to record this, I currently use 45FPS, but my videos are all buggy and stuff.
Here is the video I made so that you get the perspective whats happening:
My video
I did a quite good video (still some problems) but that was before I had to reinstall the root partition (I mistakenly format it).
Hope you can help me, in the mean time I'll try to resolve it myself

OGV is ogg video, so I think it should be fine anyway. Fengshaun, can you upload it somewhere (even some free download services) so I can see it?
Primoz: downloading and seeing what's going on.I see some kind of corruption there, what is your setup? Did you change the compression level?

Tomorrow morning I'll review the stuff more throroughly (it's night time already for me).

I had encoding on maximum quality, now I have reduced it and I can see that it's better then before there are still some problems, but it's getting better.
I guess I have a bit of out dated computer (it's just one core AMD 3000+).
I'll run some more tests but I will make this screencast tomorrow as it's nighttime for me to.