May I ask, why use video for this? Or, to make question more general, why is everyone so obsessed with these jerky, stuttery, smeary internet videos that show barely recognizable geeks with gadgets in badly lit settings?

To add insult to the injury, Flash videos do not even show well on Nokia tablets and having 3-4 of them inlined brings MicroB to its knees.

So, can I suggest that you use normal screenshots and text instead? This will let readers freely browse through lessons (not possible with videos). The readers will also be able to recognize taught UI elements (barely possible with internet videos) and won't need to wait for the video to download over a shaky connection. Finally, with text you can organize your lessons hierarchically use hyperlinks, and have a table of contents. All this is not possible with internet videos.

All in all I think fms has some very good points here.

I suggest to consider the following option:

1) Use the SDK to show the demo.
2) Record the X11 data with something like pyrecordmydesktop.

This creates the best quality of video without depending on a steady camera with light influence and mirroring and fingers/stylus in the way and so on.

You could even embed this video inside a picture of a N8x0. Heck, you could even let the user specify which device they have and this is used to show the device background picture (for example, a N800 with embedded Flash video).

The issue is here that some hacks require hardware fiddling (pressing hardware button, for example). For this I don't have a solution. But for purely software related things this would work well.

You could also change your mouse pointer icon to a stylus or a finger.

Omiting any text is not good IMO. You could use voice as feedback with the video, but some people are not native English speakers. Give them, besides the voice, also the text (transcript) of the sound. This is also useful for archiving reasons, and a quick look through for an outsider. The text could be hidden by default and become visible using JS.

I think video and screencasts are a great core idea. No stop energy should be thrown on that. If someone feels like doing more or else, go ahead.

This was one of the biggest reasons that I was thinking screen casts instead of "video"; you want to show somebody how to use their device in a mainstream kind of way... and as much as we all love to admire each other, I think taking the "hey here's me using my tablet" out of the equation helps give these tutorials a much more polished and professional appearance (at the end of the day you want people to feel like what's being demonstrated will actually be easy and effective for them to do... people generally don't get that impression when they watch shady videos of tech savvy people "working the internet magic". No offense to Krisse of course (those videos were great!), but I honestly don't see everyone involved making their videos as clean and polished as the tablet school ones were, even if the guidelines are in place.)

When it's all said and done, I think the best approach would be a combination of written and video. The suggestion I have would be people do a detailed write up of how to do something (using table of content if you want/or a common format, whatever). That "rough tutorial" then gets submitted up to the forum/feedback place/proposal area, where somebody (community member, council person, somebody who dreams about Maemo at night, etc) can jump on, claim it as "their edit", and use the SDK and screen casting software to try it out as written. If it all works, then they save the video, add it to the tutorial and the whole shebang gets put up and online. If it doesn't work as expected or there's some confusion then the person doing the "trial run" emails/posts back to the original author that changes or clarification is required, and the process continues.

It's a good open check/balance setup that results in 1) everyone can contribute tuts, whether you know how to do video and screen casts or not 2) tuts are of higher quality because there's now a "quality control" type of process involved 3) tuts are written but always include the option of a video demo showing how things should work, without requiring any real extra effort (somebody completely new should always try your tut first anyways, so if they happen to be recording their efforts at the time...). Anyways again just my two cents, but that's very similiar to the editing process I've gone through when writing articles and chapters for web-related magazines and books, and it works very, very well.

And such animations do not really need to be played in flash. They can just be encoded into a traditional animated .gif and inlined into an html page (as long as they are reasonably short and few of course).

complete agree! .gif is also for this purpose.

BTW, just realised... the upcoming devices have TV Out, don't they?

Well TV Out is extremely easy to record directly onto a computer, you just need a $20 adaptor that plugs into the USB port and the right software (which usually comes with the adaptor). You can also record TV Out onto many brands of DVD and HDD recorders, then transfer the video file onto your PC.

I've done lots of TV Out videos from Symbian devices, they are very very very very easy to shoot at perfect clarity, and even the worst film-maker would be able to make something that is clear and professional-looking. You don't need any professional software or skills, and even simple free editors like Windows Movie Maker are good enough to edit and process TV Out footage into a form that can be uploaded to YouTube.

On top of that, I think someone said mouse support is on the way? That would possibly allow pointers to be visible in TV Out recordings.


I gave lots of reasons in my original post, but I'll repeat them:

-Videos by definition show a method ACTUALLY working. Text tutorials often contain mistakes, or methods which should work in theory but don't in real life.

-People who write tutorials often leave stuff out, or write stuff unclearly. That can't happen with videos.

-Videos of a GUI in use are easy to understand in any language, increasing the global appeal of maemo. Even if text labels are different on different language settings, they are in the same place in every language so people can easily see where they should click even if they don't speak english. The tablets come with lots of language options, not everyone uses them in english.

-Videos do not assume any prior knowledge, so they're much more accessible to newbies. For example if you see someone actually clicking on the contacts icon, you don't need to know what "contacts icon" means. This also relates to the point about language above, as technical terms may be totally different in different languages.


None of my tablet school videos are like that.

I spent a lot of time and effort on making my videos as clear and well-shot as possible, and if other people could follow the same simple rules for making videos for Maemo School then it could become a very useful resource indeed.

Or, if the new devices have it, they could record from TV Out which requires virtually no effort at all, and produces a picture that has almost perfect clarity. If TV Out is available it could solve almost all of the potential quality problems.


Firstly, I don't think most people would watch them on the actual tablet. The vast majority of people who use Tablet School are watching the videos on a desktop computer, I know that from the screen resolutions in my visitor logs.

The reason for this is probably that if you watch the videos on the tablet itself, it's impossible to actually do what the tutorial is suggesting because the tablet is already in use.

But even so, I don't think Flash video will be a problem on the next device, and even the Mer update for current hardware may make things better too.

My 5800 displays Flash video (including YouTube) without any problems, and it has a slower processor and less RAM than the N8X0, so the raw hardware power clearly isn't an issue.


People who want to do that can do it in the Wiki.

I don't think it is a good way of making tutorials suitable for beginners though, for all the reasons I gave in my original post.


You can browse through videos in the index page. I suggested in my original post that there would be an index for the videos just like the current index for downloads.


You clearly haven't watched any of my Tablet School videos. Every single UI element is visible in my vids, I went to great lengths to make sure the UI is totally visible.


If you're the kind of person who has an internet tablet, I should think it's almost certain that you have a broadband connection of at least 256k or more, which is fast enough for a standard quality YouTube video. The percentage of tablet users without a 256k+ connection must be very very small.


You can have a table of contents with ANY media type, you just need to embed content on web pages which are organised into an index. I talked about all this in my original post...

And you can use hyperliks with videos if you host it on (for example) YouTube, and you can add notations too. I don't think such things are useful in a beginner's tutorial, but they are possible.

Well, this is up to the tutorial author to fix. Learning how to make GOOD tutorials does not look like a fundamental problem to me.

An animated screenshot will work just as well.

When saying that YouTube videos are smeared, jerky, and barely recognizable, I am not blaming you for making them this way. All these qualities are due to the media format itself, not to the author. It is the media format I suggest changing, not the author

While you can browse through a list of videos, you cannot easily browse inside a video due to its sequential nature (i.e. one frame at a time).

Oh yes, except that the last hop of that connection is WiFi, whose reception varies depending on where in the house you are.

Again, you can obviously have an index of videos, having an index of a single video contents is more problematic.

Anyways, I am not persuaded that one should use videos for computer tutorials, especially considering the quality limitations of these Flash videos. Maybe go with animated images aka "screencasts"?

When is it going live very very good idea the tablet school tutorials did help me alot am waiting to see more especially with the to be announced device many questions could be answered with a single video tutorial.