We’ve just posted the second screencast in our free online course in Ruby on Rails. I think it came out pretty well—but what counts is what you think! Please leave a comment here or on the Lesson Page if you get a chance to watch it.

We continue to evolve our tool setup and fight with our Macs. This time we could not get screen sharing through iChat to work reliably, so we gave Adobe’s Acrobat Connect a try. It worked flawlessly.

We’ve had problems on both Christopher’s Mac and on mine with horrible distortion spontaneously showing up in the audio track, and we ended up recording the audio multiple times and trying all sorts of different setups. For my side, I ended up just recording it on a stand-alone Zoom H2, which worked well once I got the hang of its somewhat clumsy interface.

We’ve added a couple of small software utilities to help out with the video recording process:

• The freeware Think utility provides an alternative app switcher that blacks out all the apps except for the foreground one, which helps minimize distractions.
• Artis software’s shareware Small Screen puts a box on the screen of whatever dimensions you specify, which stays on top of other applications. This makes it easy to set up the various apps to be appropriately sized for the screencast dimensions. We’ll probably spring for the $26.95 for xScope, which combines this tool with lots of other useful screen utilities.

We’re putting the screencast files on S3, which delivers higher bandwidth than our regular host so your downloads should be quick. For working with S3, I’ve been using the free S3 Browser, which is a simple open-source app that provides a GUI interface to the S3 storage buckets. I’ve started using Bucket Explorer, which costs $29.99 (after a 30-day free trial) but is considerably more capable.

On to Lesson 11…