My house was built in 1960 and we purchased it from the original owner’s son. One of the things I like about my house is the ‘flavor’ that came with it. Case in point, the light switches. Here is a collection of the unique styles we have. Notice, only one of the switches in this collection was provided by me ( the fuzzy red one ).
the switches I hit in my house
I recently asked for some screencasting advice and wanted to put this list up for future reference. I ended up using Jing Free for my particular assignment, but typically use screentoaster.com since it’s free, cross platform, and web based.
Price : $99.00
URL : http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/
Notes : ScreenFlow looks freaking amazing. If I had to do regular screencasting, I would spend the $99 to get this application. It appears to do, save, and export everything. This is the best solution for any professional screencaster.
Price : $69.00
URL : http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
Notes : If I was going to pay money for a screencast app, it would be ScreenFlow. However, I do use Ambrosia Soft’s Wiretap Studio, so I know they make great software. If $30 is enough to effect your decision, I would highly recommend looking at this before ScreenFlow.
Price : free
URL : http://www.jingproject.com/features/
Notes : Jing Free is pretty sweet, but only captures a maximum of five minutes of video. For my assignment that ended up being good so I could keep my videos short. The pay service looks really helpful for sharing captures ( images, videos, etc ), but I just can’t justify signing up for this yet.
Price : $69.95
URL : http://silverbackapp.com/
Notes : This capturing app is geared towards taking videos for usability studies. This is a really cool application that I’d take a closer look if I wasn’t such a server side programmer. Be sure to watch the demo, it’s a really cool application, just not good for what I was doing.
Price : FREE
URL : http://www.screentoaster.com
Notes : This is a free web based screen recording service that I use fairly often. You can’t beat free, and this will run on your MAC or PC since it’s browser based. Definitely worth a look if you need something quick and want to sharing capabilities.
This piece is called eMpower2 and it was free handed on my MacBook Pro’s magical trackpad. The application used was Mr.Doob’s Harmony drawing tool. It’s the sweetest open source HTML5 drawing tool I’ve seen yet. I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot of HTML5 based drawing tools soon.
The past repeats itself, stay true to your game and yourself
Here’s a clever little solution I would like to add to the book of ‘get it done’. While this particular example uses ASP.NET controls, this concept really applies to any language that supports DataBinding to a control.
The base concept is using your knowledge of SQL’s UNION operator to add a temp value to the beginning of a list of data from a sql query. In the past I’ve done this countless times via code, and recently I didn’t have the time to do this, so I updated the query to a UNION, and I was good to go.
Now I’m not selling this as a ‘best practice’, but I do consider this one more reason why it’s good to know SQL.
Problem : Using a SQLDataSource to populate a DropDown component, how do you inject a spacer value in position 0? EX : “- select value -”
Solution : Inject your spacer value in your SelectCommand via sql’s UNION operator
<asp:DropDownList runat="server" ID="meter_manufacturer_dd" DataSourceID="sql_meterManufacturer" DataTextField="Manufacturer" />
<asp:SqlDataSource runat="server" ID="sql_meterManufacturer"
SelectCommand="
SELECT '- Choose Manufacturer -' as Manufacturer
UNION
SELECT DISTINCT Manufacturer FROM Smart_Meter_DEF"
/>
What this solution gets you.
1. Your spacer value shows up in position 0 ( because the first character is – and not alphanumeric )
2. Auto ViewState caching ( EG : going straight .NET solution, .NET handles persisting your dropdown selection between postbacks )
* in this sample, the connectionString for the SqlDataSource is set in code.
