This week’s Learning Rails online course screencast covers authentication and walks through using Rick Olsen’s restful_authentication plugin (and plugins in general). We are taking our time through each of these topics to try to provide as much general information as possible without making the pace too slow. Comments on the episodes seem generally positive, but we’d always like to hear more.

We have a general outline for the various future episodes, but we are also incorporating feedback from viewers and starting to incorporate a “refactoring” portion of the ‘cast to fix up or explain something that may have been less than clear. We’ll also use watchers/listener feedback to influence future episode content, so keep those comments coming.

On the back-end side, a few updates.

As we improve our skills on screencasting (blame the editing on me! I’m the videographer in training), we will play around a little with making the visuals as clear as possible. We are close to finding our “final” tool set, and I’ll blog about that in the next few weeks once things settle down. We are still trying to record some of the content concurrently, with Michael and I in different cities. Sometimes, we still need to record separate takes and I merge them in post-production. This week we’ve been trying out Adobe’s Acrobat Connect as the cross-platform (at least Mac Friendly) screen sharing solution.

Leopard’s iChat screen sharing is really nice, but hasn’t been working for us lately (reasons unknown). Also, since we both run on dual monitors (or more), iChat is a little annoying in that it can’t target specific screens for sharing. If anyone has a hack to work-around this, I’d love to hear it. Acrobat Connect allows you to share a specific screen, which is nice.