ShowMeDo Blog

The second walk-through showing Wingware’s latest Wing IDE v3 Pro in action is available in ShowMeDo:

In this episode I show you how to debug an application and write new code whilst debugging the currently running process. Topics covered:

• The Exception tool
• Conditional Breakpoints
• Debug I/O window
• Debug Probe
• Looking at variables inside a live process (Debug Probe , Stack Data tool)
• Developing new code whilst debugging our application

Here is the series link to both episodes: Introducing Wing 3. This videos is in our IDE screencast section as well as our Python tutorial screencasts section.

See Wingware’s latest IDE - Wing Pro v3 - in action in the first of two introductory screencasts.

Here I show you how to start coding and navigating to help you answer the question ‘How can Wing help me with my Python development?’.

Topics covered:

• Display customisation - visual theme, keyboard personality, toolbar
• Auto-complete with tab
• Source Assistant for help text and argument guides
• Source Browser listing active functions and variables
• ‘Find’ and jump-to-definition navigation

This videos is in our IDE screencast section as well as our Python tutorial screencasts section.

In the comments Jerol Harrington asked about the features and price difference between the Personal and Professional versions.

Stephan Deibel (Wingware) responded with a helpful explanation. This and the forthcoming second video will be on display in Wingware’s instructional video section.

I’m pleased to say that we’re clarifying our message for our professional screencasting services on our ShowMeDo Services website.

We know now that one of our clear advantages is that we have great expertise at making screencasts for product demonstrations, marketing and technical support. I have changed the format of our Services page to make this clearer.

We have also rolled out the first version of our statistics reporting service. We can report the number of plays and finishes that a video has every day.

I don’t know of any other site that reports the number of times that a video is fully-played - this information is hugely useful when optimising a video’s content and its display on a page. Screenshots of this will follow.

Dai just keeps on adding more great Scribus tutorial videos to the site.  Heathenx has joined us and is building up a great set of Inkscape tutorial videos in the Graphics section (e.g. this one on creating a globe in Inkscape).

Gasto is our newest author and he has started work on a C video tutorial series which begins with a study skills for (C) programmers episode.

Our authors frequent our ShowMeDo Google Group where we discuss new videos and features that ShowMeDo needs - do feel free to join us and share your thoughts.

Side note - if you’re interested in Professional Screencast Production then do see our ShowMeDo Services website, our experience building tutorial videos for ShowMeDo means that we are very experienced with screencasting.  We can create walk-throughs to show your users how to use your website and software, technical support guides and training material.  Just get in contact and tell us what you need.

Interestingly I’m getting some public interest now for professional screencast production via our ShowMeDo Services site. (please see ProCasts, this replaces ShowMeDo’s Services arm).

People seem to be coming through from google with terms like ’screencasting service’ and ’screencast production’ and given the evidence from ShowMeDo that I can produce clear and informative screencasts - we’re getting requests for production.  This is great and rather unexpected - woot!

I wanted to extend the range of videos that we can accept inside ShowMeDo’s uploader/processor, in particular several users have uploaded mp4 video and mp4a audio which our ffmpeg didn’t understand.

To enable mp4a decoding I needed to compile libfaad/libfaac on our RedHat box, here are the instructions. Note that libfaac is required - I tried it without and mp4a wasn’t in the list of codecs (ffmpeg -formats). See e.g. this forum post.

This builds upon my Compiling LAME on RedHat and Compiling ffmpeg on RedHat articles.

libfaad is a part of the open-source FAAC project (wikipedia) - the ‘c’ is the encoder, the ‘d’ is the decoder. First I fetched faad2-src from sourceforge.

Using the existing ~/tmp directory I exported it again for this session:

export TMPDIR=~/tmp

and then ran:

autoreconf -vif
./configure --with-mp4v2 --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Afterwards my ~/lib contained libfaad.a/.so etc.

Next I fetched faac-src and used:

./configure --with-mp4v2 --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

and the result was libfaac in ~/lib.

John has written a useful SQLObject Performance Guide which I’ve just used to optimise ShowMeDo’s database usage.

SQLObject was the default for TurboGears when we started. Understanding what goes on under the hood is essential to making it perform well.

John uses examples to discuss:

• Query logging (debug=True)
• SQLRelatedJoin vs RelatedJoin (and MultipleJoins)
• Lazy vs ‘normal’ db access