The Bioscreencast Blog

First of all, thank you to everyone for all the feedback and suggestions. There are always a lot of things we can do to make Bioscreencast the perfect user experience, but we feel that some of the new features you might have already seen in the past day or so will make your time on the site a lot better.

So what do we have in store for you in this new beta release of Bioscreencast.com

Internet Explorer is no longer the forbidden zone. Bioscreencast.com should now run properly on both IE6 and 7. Please let us know if you find anything behaving in unexpected ways

Flash video format support is something we’ve discussed among ourselves for months, and finally we bit the bullet and now the screencasts are all flash. We have tried our best to keep the quality as high as possible, but this change should create a truly cross platform/cross browser experience for everyone. We also believe that the move away from H.264 will finally convince Apple to add Flash support on the iPhone.

A redesigned landing page will new icons, the most recent upload and a news feed (for now just this blog), should also make being visiting Bioscreencast.com a better experience.

There are some additional usability related changes as well. For example, you can now access the embed code and screencast URL without needing to play the screencast.

This is just the first in a series of updates you will keep seeing as Bioscreencast.com grows and evolves. Adding support for Internet Explorer was at the top of the list and we all need to thank Suresh for doing such a marvelous job of turning this around as quickly as he did.

Last but certainly not the least. Bioscreencast.com will only go where you, the users and producers will take it. So I encourage anyone who does computational life science to download Camstudio and start screencasting. If you want to learn how, just visit the wiki or check out one of the screencasting tutorials.

No, we haven’t gone on vacation or found solace in the Himalayas. We are continuing to work hard on addressing some of the main feedback we got when the site first went live. There should be exciting updates for everyone soon. In the meantime, your screencasts are always welcome. We would love to get some screencasts on subjects ranging from ligand docking to the visualization of complex cellular networks

Bioscreencast.com got picked as an Editor’s Pick at Yahoo Gallery, and was the featured pick for a while. As you might guess, that made us all very proud of our star developer.

It’s been a week since Bioscreencast.com saw the light of day. We’ve seen some growing pains and we would like to thank you for your support, especially those who have tested out a few things for us.

Without a vibrant user community, it just becomes a site for us to upload our favorite videos. We are looking Please let us know what we can do to make your experience better

Talking about experiences, this weekend will also see some cool new features being rolled ou. We hope that they will make your experience at Bioscreencast a lot better. In the meantime don’t forget to check out the Wiki for tips and tricks.

It has been a great start to Bioscreencast, and we would like to thank everyone for their feedback and support. I am sure some of you have noticed that Bioscreencast.com does not play nice with Internet Explorer. As many of you know, Internet Explorer has issues with web standards that create problems for sites like ours. We are aware that many of you are Internet Explorer users, either due to necessity or choice, and we are looking into addressing this limitation. However, as a small “in our spare time” operation with one developer, it might take us a while before we can add support for Internet Explorer. In the meantime, if you can, downloading Firefox for viewing Bioscreencast.com on Windows is highly recommended.

In a wonderful post-foo camp post at Nascent, Timo Hannay writes about the promise of online scientific communication. Part of his commentary of the subject has to do with the rising role of audio and video in scientific communication. The falling costs of hardware and software, and changing patterns in “consumer” behavior are key reasons for the success of the iPod, YouTube, etc. The question that we have been asking ourselves is how can science take advantage of these changing trends in communication and continue to make sure that we are not only educated, but that young people continue to remain interested in the sciences. Timo mentiones JoVe as an interesting experiment in this area. Just as JoVE helps to communicate the “tacit skill” in laboratory experimentation , we definitely believe that screencasting can do its bit considering that all experimentation today involves the use of computers and computational data analysis. Hopefully, with all your help, we will find out that video is an effective means of communicating science, especially disseminating information on how we apply it in our daily research lives.

While some might get the impression that Bioscreencast.com is targeted exclusively to biologists, a great screencast by Jean-Claude Bradley demonstrates that chemists are equally welcome, which of course makes the three former chemists in the team feel very good.

Jean-Claude’s video is the first external upload to the site and that in itself makes the whole effort worth it!!! We hope to see many more from many more people.