LibCasting

I’ve added a couple new screencasts to my Database Examples page. First of all, CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox add-on extension which can, surprise!, customize Google in a wide variety of ways. When they updated their extension recently, I was pleased to see they offered screencasts, labeled as their “Introduction Movie.” With three versions available (Flash, Animated GIF, and Windows Media Player), all produced from Camtasia by the looks of it, I was surprised that the only audio was background music and that call outs highlighted the actions. In general, I much prefer an audio commentary that explains what is happening. In this case, I actually found the music helped to hold my interest as the call out speech bubbles would give the explanatory textual explanation. I think the pacing is just about right (perhaps a little fast), and the music is not too distracting.

Contrast those with the silent screencasts that LexisNexis offers showing its new Academic interface that will be launching in beta in January and go live summer 2007. These will be available within the new interface as well. But for now, to view these, go to the Redesign 2007 page and scroll down to the tutorials section under Features. Or use the links I’ve extracted below.

• Overview
• Selecting Sources
• Working with Results

I assume these have no sound since someone assumes they’ll be viewed in a library. Despite my interest in the new interface, I lost interest in these screencasts fairly quickly. The pause and other controls are at the top, rather than at the bottom like on most online video players. Even though I could control the pace, I found it a bit slow and confusing. The Selecting Sources tutorial kept giving a “You try it” option where I can click on a particular button, but then the next step did not have me click anything. I’d rather have more information, like an audio commentary.

So there are my conflicting evaluations of two screencasts with no audio commentary. I’m curious to hear if others have the same or different reactions to these.

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