Carmen Ferrara’s Weblog 2.0

I came across this stock icons review site today. This is why I’m an avid reader of the BOS forum. You always come across gems like this.

I’m in the final stages of readying my beta and I’m in need of some well designed icons. This site just cut my research time down significantly.

I’ve been spending time over the past month or so in the Microsoft Producer user group, and have been getting some great information and feedback on the upcoming release of iPresent Producer , my soon to be released web presentation tool. (Quick note on the name iPresent Producer: I never intended for this to be the final name of the product, and so I’m in the process of renaming the product and defining its identity, as I get closer to launch - more on this later).

Anyhow, I really should be blogging more frequently, but I’ve just been so focused on development. Luckily, I’ve been speaking with some great folks over in the MS Producer forum. I really wished I had participated in this forum earlier in the process. I can’t stress the importance of spreading the word about your new product, even before it is released. The feedback and response you receive is well worth any “trade secrets” you may reveal.

However, you have to approach participating in a forum where your potential customers may exist in the right manner. Here are some tips for doing so:

1. First and foremost, a forum is no place for blatantly marketing your product. You need to contribute in a meaningful way - answer questions and share useful information using your expertise in the market. I’ve been a user of MS Producer for several years, and have a lot of experience creating and distributing streaming media. I tend to answer technical questions on the board, because that’s what I know best.
2. When answering technical questions, help the poster achieve a resolution to their problem. That means following the thread, and continuing to help until the poster is satisfied. You should view it as a practice run to the customer support that you’ll eventually provide.
3. When you do contribute a useful response/post - always include your signature with a link to your website or blog.
4. When a poster says: I wish Product X did Y. That’s your opportunity to pounce. I feel it is completely appropriate to mention that you’re building a similar product that solves the unmet need. However, I usually respond first with another alternative solution (even a competitor’s product), then I mention that I’m working on something that does Y

Anyhow, if done tactfully, contributing to forums related to your market can be a great way to introduce your product to potential customers, and more importantly a great way to receive feedback.

One of the areas I’ve been focusing my efforts has been that of supported media formats. Basically, iPresent Producer will support the following output formats:

Audio presentations:
Windows Media, QuickTime (MOV), and Flash (SWF)
Video presentations:
Windows Media and QuickTime

Additionally, Producer will support 2 output modes: ‘embedded’ or ‘stand-alone’. Embedded will create a standard webcast presentation – (ie. talking head, slide area, and other content areas using synchronization and an embedded media player). Stand-alone will create a single media file that is played back in the user’s media player of choice. For an audio presentation, the media player will display a large slide synched with the presenter’s narration. For video, the slide area will also include a picture-in-picture video of the presenter.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working to get this all included within the first release. Having quite a bit of experience building these sorts of applications in the past, and dealing with media format incompatibilities and the nuances of operating systems, and PC configurations – I really wanted to nail accessibility. Accessibility, in the sense that viewing streaming media should be easy for the end viewer. If the user has a Mac, they should be able to view a QuickTime video. They shouldn’t have to download and install Windows Media Player or get the latest Flash player. If the user prefers watching videos using the QuickTime player itself (as opposed from within a web page) then so be it.

Initially, I was planning to only support Windows Media for my v1 release, but the prevalence of Flash audio/video and the resurgence of QuickTime’s MOV format; I felt I needed to get this in. This is also a key differentiator amongst other e-learning/online presentation tools. Many vendors focus on a one particular output format, but I just don’t see that as a viable option. A user can arguably get any of the leading media formats to playback on their particular operating system of choice (except Windows Media on Linux), but they will most likely have to jump through hoops to do so. By offering several output options, content producers can pick a format that meets the majority of their user’s needs. But, they have the flexibility to create certain content/presentations in other formats, as the situation arises.

I thought I knew a fair amount about embedded media players, script commands, markers, the DOM, FSCommand and scripting control – but I’ve learned quite a bit more. Anyhow, I hope to begin writing some tutorials on how to include rich media within a website. Of course I’ll be using iPresent Producer to create the tutorials, so stay tuned.

I received my copy of Streaming Media magazine today. This is a new print publication put out by Streamingmedia.com. The print version will be sent out quarterly and I imagine all the articles, reviews, news, etc. will be available online as well. I don’t think the content in this new publication will be all that different from the regular site content, but it’s nice to see a print publication for the streaming industry out there. I’ve followed Streamingmedia.com for several years, and attended the annual Streaming Media East tradeshow a couple of years ago. It is an excellent resource from a busines of streaming perspective, as well as from a technical perspective. If you’d like a free subscription, you can sign up here.

One interesting item from this month’s issue was a review of Macromedia/Adobe’s Captivate and TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio products. Basically, these two products are the gold standard of web presentation tools, and iPresent Producer’s nearest competitors. Generally speaking, the reviews were positive, noting that Captivate excelled in creating software simulations, whereas Camtasia Studio was more adept at creating “quick and dirty” web presentations. The reviewer glowingly decided you need both tools in your rich media software arsenal. That’s a pretty pricey proposition. Also, one glaring error I noticed was the incorrect pricing for Camtasia Studio, listing it at $29.99 (should have been $299).

As it has been stated before, there’s nothing wrong with entering a competitive market, as long as you can differentiate yourself - which I believe iPresent Producer will do. Also, it’s also a good thing to be entering a strong, healthy market like rich media communications.

I couldn’t let an entire month pass by without a post. So on this last day of March I just had to slip one in. Yes, it’s been very quiet on the blog front, but not so on the home front. On March 8th, we welcomed Claire Kathleen into the world, and we couldn’t be happier. We are all settling in quite nicely.

Sleep deprivation aside, I’m feeling rather invigorated and ready to make a final push towards getting iPresent Producer out the door.

I recently came across another set of great developer resources put out by Yahoo.

• PHP Resources
• User Interface components (AJAX based)
• Yahoo User Interface blog
• Yahoo User Interface design patters site

I’ve been working on some AJAX stuff lately but there’s just so many libraries, frameworks, and projects to come up to speed on - so it’s nice to see something put out by the big guys. These Yahoo developer sites are fairly new, so I’ll be checking back often for updates.

Once we launch, presentations created with iPresent Presio can be optionally published to our hosted service, iPresent Online. I have not completely finalized the v1 functionality for iPresent Online, but suffice to say, it will be very lean on features. The primary purpose is to provide a place for users to easily store presentations when they do not have access to their own web server or public network location. Eventually, iPresent Online will provide all sorts of reporting, assessment, and user management features.

Anyhow, I’ve been playing around with the excellent Prototype and script.aculo.us javascript libraries, as I plan on using a bit of AJAX type functionality (where appropriate) within iPresent Online. One feature will be a slide management/viewer function where a user can easily view individual slides for a published presentation. In spec’ing out this feature, I wanted to use a fairly innovative way to provide slide viewing. Then I stumbled upon John Berry’s excellent solution on his Agile Partners Weblog - a movable slider to resize images on the fly. You can view the complete source that does this on his site or take a look at the example below. Feel free to open this link in a separate window and grab the source.