The Bioscreencast Blog

Well here is me writing in with an apology for a lot of site disruptions that many of you have written to us about.We are trying to unleash a whole new set of features this summer as we approach our one year anniversary. Of course we are cramming all this in while the six of us change-jobs , finish projects and work on new stuff and the result..well as some of you noticed a few problems have crept up.

We are trying to fix these problems and hopefully have things flow smoothly. Thanks to everyone who wrote in and we are very glad for your support.

harijay

One of our motivations for starting bioscreencast.com was the rather poor resolution of screencasts hosted on youtube. Most screencasts on youtube suffer due to the high degree of compression youtube puts its videos through. Screencasts generally convey a lot more when you can actually read and see whats going on on the screen.The fine text, the snazzy antialiased icons , all suffer at the hands of most compression settings , making it rather painful to follow along.

However , youtube recently added a feature that may offer a small way out of this, especially for screencasts. Youtube annotations. What this basically allows you to do is add small text pop-ups on the videos you author ( kinda like VH1s popup video) .

The popups can be finely controlled down to the tenths of a second for appearance and dissaperance and come in three flavors , text box , speech bubble and spotlights. I first heard about this feature on Jon Udells blog where he talks about how this really adds value to screencasts and couldnt wait to try the feature out . I went all out and edited one of my bioscreencast screencasts which explain how to use the “links popup” and “History option” to combine searches on the NCBI for biomedical search and put it up on youtube. Since the youtube embed player still does not support these annotations , check out the video on the youtube site itself by clicking on this link.

Having switched to using a mac almost a year and a half back. I generally keep track of screencasting apps for the mac. The unofficial apple weblog (tuaw) has a very good review of screencasting apps for the Mac. Check out the review and let us know which apps you prefer by writing in or better yet,  put it up on our Mac screencast wiki page.

I personally have always used IShowU  for capture and  Quicktime-Pro for all my editing, but with the entry of all these options maybe I will check some of  these out.

-hari

We are having a few problems with our user database . We have been changing a lot of things under the hood and in an attempt to add user profiles and other user centric features we just noticed that logins and new registrations are not working.We shall post something here once its all fixed . We thank everyone who wrote in and hope to have this resolved soon.

Update: we have fixed the issue as of May 21st 16hrs US Eastern time. So as the saying goes ” If you see something say something”

Seatte is a great city to live in if you’re interested in new media. My friend Stuart Maxwell has a great post up on how he went about getting into screencasting.

Of course, we’d hope that if you are interested in sharing your screencasts with the life science community bioscreencast would be right on top of the list

Technorati Tags: screencasting, videoblog

Michael Pascoe is back and his latest screencast tells you how to use the equation editor in Microsoft Word, something all of us have struggled with in our lives, especially if you have a paper to submit for class.

Watch away (best way to watch is to expand the video to full size)

Technorati Tags: screencast, equations

Pulling in posts that were sent to bbgm while this blog was in transition. But we’re back!!!

Neuroscience is a fascinating subject for many, and for various reasons, I have a rather soft spot for the field. The computational challenges of neuroscience are, surprise surprise, rather intriguing. After all, our brain is in many ways the ultimate computer, and we are always trying to figure out how it works and how to replicate intelligence artificially.

Through Frank Gibson’s screencasts on Bioscreencast, I found out about the CARMEN, a neuroinformatics project that aims to “create an e-science infrastructure in which data on neuronal activity (electrical and optical measures) can be shared, stored, manipulated and modelled”.

Neuroinformatics is data intensive and is fed by heteregenous data types. Unfortunately a lot of the data is confined to a single lab, i.e. the broader community is not being tapped properly (something that was forced onto biology by the sheer breadth of the human genome project). But the CARMEN project leapfrogs some of the trajectory of bioinformatics, by providing a virtual laboratory that incorporates knowledge about experimental conditions and extensive amounts of meta-data. It took biofinformaticians a long time to realize that capturing experimental information as meta-data was important.

CARMEN is an ambitious project, and to be truly successful will need to last a lot longer than the current 4 year pilot.

This presentation tells you about the CARMEN project, and some of the challenges the project hopes to address.

A few months ago, we decided that a website where life scientists could load screencasts was a good idea. That wee little website, Bioscreencast.com just hit an important milestone. Earlier today, Bronwen Dekker, Assistant Editor at Nature Protocols uploaded what turned out to be screencasts number 99 and 100.

Bronwen’s screencasts are another excellent example of the power of screencasting

In the first screencast, Bronwen shows you how to prepare tables that meet the requirements for journals like Nature Protocols, and in the second she shows you how to resize images. Both are practical examples. They also show how publishers can interact with people to highlight some best practices.

We are moving the bioscreencast blog to it’s own domain which is why these posts are not happening there, plus everyone subscribed to that blog probably reads this one too

Technorati Tags: Bioscreencast, Screencasting, Nature Protocols

Back when we thought about putting Bioscreencast together, we had a vision of people doing their daily work, realizing that there was something interesting to share, turning on their favorite screencasting app, and then recording a screencast. Today, Michael Pascoe uploaded a screencast that, for me, personifies that vision. In the screencast below, Michael demonstrates how he uses Illiad and Papers to pursue a paperless PhD (If you have a Mac and $42 you HAVE to get this). The screencast is short, it’s simple, and it makes you want to go and get Papers. Perfect!!!

Technorati Tags: Illiad, Library, Papers