The sixth screencast is posted and should be propagating to iTunes and our email lists now. In this episode we do something quick (show setting up acts_as_textiled), then show something else that should be quick, but turns in to a reality check.

Michael walks through “dropping in” in-place editing to our simple CMS, and quickly demonstrates what happens when you have to scratch the surface of Rails: things don’t work as documented, things may not have documentation, plugins can quickly drift out of sync with the current releases of Rails (edge or otherwise), you may have to sift through Rails bug reports to find “just the right patch”.

Blue Oyster Cult may have gotten it right with Hot Rails to Hell.

The great thing (???) is that almost certainly someone has had to cover this ground before and a little targeted use of Google will yield a clue. The thing that absolutely sucks is that almost certainly someone has had to cover this before, proposed a fix that is gathering dust, and you have to dig for it.

Of course, that’s where we hope to help…trying to expose the rough, dark edges AND help provide useful documentation/links/screencasts that will smooth those corners.

If you are a subscriber to our free online course or a regular listener to our LearningRails podcast (via iTunes or another RSS feed), we just posted Episode 9 (now also called Lesson 9). This is our first crack at capturing visually the complete walk-through of building a Ruby on Rails application. We’ll be taking it slowly, and iteratively, to try to explain all of the basics for beginners.

From a production point of view, we are still working on our technique. Unlike the podcasts, where Michael and I would record our parts separately and then edit them together, we wanted to make the screencasts a bit more “live” and conversational. Given that we live in cities a couple of hours apart, we are experimenting with tools to find the right combination for our needs.

Currently, we are using two Macintoshes (running Mac OS X 10.5) and using the new screensharing ability built in to Leopard. Michael has our slides prepared in Preview, has Macromates’ TextMate sized for our window, and iTerm.

We use Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X to capture Michael’s screen and narration while I watch via the screen share. We originally tried to capture my ‘shared’ voice (which Snapz can do), but the quality wasn’t that great given our bandwidth.

On my side, I originally recorded my voice using a copy of BIAS’ Peak LE 5, but the quality was flaky on my machine. I’ve used it before without problems, so this was troubling. I ended up capturing a good take with Garageband.

During the whole session, we were also monitoring each other over the phone.

With the raw materials, I edited things together, giving Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac a try. I have used Premiere for years on Windows, and was happy that it came back to the Mac. My experience, however, was just so-so this time. I had some troubles with importing the source materials and then getting things tweaked. Even got a hang one time. Sorry for the slight “slow motion” effect in this first episode. We can work around that next time by capturing our source material with slightly different settings. I’m also going to look in to trying Final Cut Studio once I save my pennies for it.

We look forward to your comments about the content or the production in general.