I’ve been a fan of ScreenCasts Online for ages and ages, and not just because Don McAllister is a personal friend of mine. I am a fan because of how much I learn from him. I’ve talked to you before about how amazing he is, and I’ve tried to explain in words how he seems to see things in applications that I would NEVER find. My favorite illustration before now was how he showed all these menus on the right side of Aperture that I never noticed in years of using the software.
I just found another example. Let me set the stage first. When I go on vacation I write an email diary of the trips that I send to about 83 of my closest friends. I write funny little anecdotes and insert photos along the way. Every trip I give everyone on distribution the chance to opt out but in years of doing this only one person has exercised that option (and they had a good reason other than they hate the emails). I do get complaints when OS X removes people randomly from my “vacation emails” groups though so I’m pretty sure they’re actually entertaining.
Wally Cherwinski, who was on the India trip with us, has been a happy reader of my silly little emails for years. He said he even liked getting them while on the trip with me because he knew that he wouldn’t have to take any notes to remember where we’d been or what we’d done because he could just refers to my emails. But then he had a scarier idea, he said I should make this particular trip into an iBook.
That sounded like fun so I launched iBooks Author…and got stuck almost immediately. No worries, I remembered watching Don’s screencasts on how to use iBooks Author a few years ago, so I knew that with my subscription I could go back into the archives and rewatch them to refresh my memory.
And that’s when I caught Don doing what he does so very well. I could describe it to you in words, but instead I did a screen recording of HIS screen recording where you can see and hear what he discovered that I never would have found. Enjoy the embedded YouTube link in the shownotes!
Using a Screen Reader? click here
You’re doing a screencast of watching a screencast? Wow. That’s pretty meta. That’s very Inception. I think my brain is about to explode.
Seriously though, agreed, ScreenCasts is awesome. I’ve used a lot of the apps that he shows off, but like you, even I find features/tricks/commands/etc. that I’ve never heard of before or never noticed before. And he covers quite a bit of material that’s new to me as well. And I’ve found quite a few great apps on both Mac and iOS that solved a problem for me, that I heard about through watching ScreenCastsOnline.