Dual-purposing rocks! Since many people resolve to be more effective in 2009, I thought I'd do a couple things at once:
- Show Tree Style Tab, which gives you a simple-yet-awesome way to manage lots of tabs in Firefox… by arranging them in a vertical column. No more of that dinky horizontal strip nonsense. I've talked about it before but this is the first time I've really video'ed it to show you exactly how it looks on my setup.
- Practice uploading video tutorials to YouTube HD, whose quality surprises me. It looks even better in fullscreen mode — true 1280×720!.
Have a watch and try Tree Style Tab out, as its usefulness becomes more apparent with extended usage. Once you go vertical, you'll never go… er, you understand.
Curious for more detail on #2?
I'm setting up a faster pipeline in which I:
- Record my Mac's screen with iShowU HD. Currently using Photo-JPEG but I notice that has odd discoloration and turns grays into slight greens, so I'm going to try Apple Intermediate and Animation codecs next.
- Drag the saved movie file into Compressor. iShowU is fast: the movie is ready seconds after save, it doesn't have to be rendered like ScreenFlow and others need to do.
- Submit the file with my tweaked preset, render to H.264 @ 1280×720. I ran into numerous -50 error problems upon completion and am still trying to find out what causes them. But I finally got settings which work right. OH! And if you're wondering why I run this through Compressor, it's because it has a built-in Peak Limiter which boosts my voice levels. Not as comprehensive as the effects chain I have in Sony Vegas, but a lot quicker. If iShowU had this built-in, maybe I could record straight to H.264. More apps should have limiters, and this is proof.
- Upload to YouTube. It can take awhile for the HD version to show up and the standard version is utterly unacceptable, so I proceed to other activities until it's done. Then…
- Use YouTube Code Generator, set width to 720 pixels, and copy the "Wide screen embed (high def)" snippet into a blog post like this!
What else could be improved?
I wish On Demand thumbails got autogenerated by WordPress, but they aren't, so I use YouTube's own. The featured images for my blog can be considerably larger (up to 800×350), so I capture them separately. Currently playing with Skitch and LittleSnapper as well as some web tools to find out which is the best for my quickfire screenshot needs.
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I've used that add-on too for Firefox, although since 3.0.5 (the version I use), it doesn't seem to work for some reason, which is kind of upsetting. :/
I can say that I find vertical tabs to work better. Maybe the next thing is to implement it in the viewer, maybe as an option.