It is an axiom in software development – more often than not, it takes more time and effort to document a project than it does to actually do it.

Which is why a lot of documentation never gets written…

Qt Demo on the Loose

Which is why it’s taken forever to get my simple little Qt demo up and posted.

But, it’s there – QXListView is out for the world to see at http://qxlistview.sourceforge.net .

Video Throes

Part of the documentation effort has been making a video demonstration. My first attempt was to just use a video camera to shoot the screen – there’s no flicker issue with LCD’s, so it ought to work, right?

Well, it works, but the result was terribly fuzzy, so that wouldn’t do at all.

The next attempt was to find some screen capture software for the Mac. There are a few out there, but I settled on a beta thing called Screenium. I found a setting that gave me nice, clear video and proceeded to work through the demo.

Screenium is ok – has some nice feature, but it’s way beta. I had a lot of troubles with it stopping prematurely or just recording a blank screen (but with soundtrack.)

But, I managed to cobble together a bunch of clips. Next, I brought those up in iMovie, edited them, and prepared to export them, happily expecting a movie to come out the other end.

No such luck!! Sound, but no video.

Crawled around the web and after posting numerous questions in numerous forums, I discovered to my dismay that my ‘nice, clear video’ codec (’animation’, which is an Apple codec, I understand) was not exportable by iMovie (which is an Apple product, I understand.)

What to do? I didn’t want to pop for professional-level stuff just to do this little project, and I didn’t want to record everything over. So I started looking for converters and stumbled across MPEGStreamClip. This nice little app allowed me to convert the ‘animation’ coded clips to H.264 (with a myriad of settings I don’t quite understand), which is a variant iMovie could export. But, I lost my nice clear images in the bargain. Now they’re a little fuzzy, but they’re better than the video camera atttempt.

So, I could finally export my movie, package up the demo, and get it out to the site.

Next, I have to update my home site (this) to point to the demos.

A bit wanky, but hopefully once I work out the flow, more should be coming.

But, there’s something else coming up that’s going to impact the time I can put on this, and change the direction of the next few dozen blogs, I think.

More on that, later.

rickb