• Myth: Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear talks about the dangers of biometric data collection explaining that if a government tries to oppress its citizens knowledge about them is the ultimate power. It is a bit UK centric, but a good point
• Collateral Damage is a post by Joa Ebert explaining his unhappiness about the changes in Flash game licensing by Adobe. Unlike other posts, this one doesn’t lament about the money, but the lack of innovation and overdue language enhancements. Come to the HTML5 side, we need folk like you, Joa.
• As an answer and to make things more clear for the Flash world, Lee Brimelow released An unofficial premium feature FAQ about Flash, debunking some of the fears of people.
• Tech, not toys by the ever prolific Jeremy Zawodny explains his unhappiness about schools giving iPads to students. Jeremy points out that iPads, whilst being obviously superior to books do not teach kids technology but are just another consumption device. Instead of giving out iPads, schools should teach kids how to tinker with programming and build things, as shown in the Mozilla Hackasaurus program. I agree.
• Publish what you learn is a nice in-depth explanation of the simple step to start blogging and show up on people’s radar as explained in the Move the Web Forward web site. I find the article wonderful and inspiring but it gets a but overly excited in the end. HTML5 Boilerplate is amazing but not the “most important front-end development project in the Web’s short history” :). Also, the section about commenting forgets that comments over the last years have become tedious to maintain and attract trolls more than real discussion. I agree that people should read a whole article before commenting, but this is not how the web works these days. I turned off comments here for that very reason, it was a waste of my time. There is some great advice in there about updating your posts as a writer, though!
• Forbes’ “Women in Tech” series asks if Coding And Tech Skills As The Next Need-to-know Skill Sets? and the article confused me more than anything else. I agree that “tech literacy” needs to be higher, but I don’t think an article stating that “programming, coding and tech skills” are important without explaining what the differences between them are (I am confused about that) helps. I am also pretty annoyed that the US government considers San Francisco the place to find tech volunteers and asks entrepreneurs who build foodspotting and self-branding web2.0 sites as experts. Why not people like Coder Dojo, Codecademy or other programs that try to promote “tech literacy”? Why not use the internet to promote tech literacy rather than trying to pry tech talent from the hands of companies that offer 5 figure sign up bonuses as they are desperate to find people in the South Bay already?

Summary: Mozilla is releasing a Evangelism Representative program and I’ll be coaching Mozillians to become public speakers.

Five years ago a few well-meaning web folk in the UK were ready to start a program called “make me a speaker”. I blogged about it and there was a Wiki at http://www.makemeaspeaker.com/ which is now defunct (Wayback machine archive here). One of the things I also published back then was a Public speaking survival kit.

As with many great ideas, makemeaspeaker.com one died quickly as people got busy with other things and of course others thought it makes more sense to offer speaking and presentation training as a service for money.

Two years later I took the idea up again and making myself a developer evangelist I published the Developer Evangelism Handbook.

Other things that happened were the Speaking out events (here, here and here) organised by Laura North.

Now I am happy to announce that a larger part of my job with the awesome that is Mozilla will be taken up doing an Evangelism Reps program. Here is what it is about:

Today the Developer Engagement Team has launched the Evangelism Reps program – a special interest group within ReMo. Each year, we get thousands of requests to send Mozilla speakers around the world to talk about HTML5, new web technologies, Mozilla’s mission, our projects, products and more. Now, we would love for you to join the effort and become a Mozilla speaker too!

This program is open to paid staff and Mozilla Reps of all skill levels and capabilities. If you are a new speaker and have always wanted to represent Mozilla at events, you can take advantage of our advanced speaker training where you can learn from people like Christian Heilmann and Robert Nyman on how to give effective presentations and get access to their best practices. People who are veteran speakers can also benefit by having the tools and resources available to host events, prepare stunning screen casts and be mentors to new Evangelism Reps.

[...]

The Evangelism Reps program information is on the wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SIGs/Evangelism_Reps

We anticipate our first training to be held in May so stay tuned for this exciting opportunity.

This means I will be running interviews, give reviews, run a speaker training and publish the Evangelism Reps toolkit – the latter of course being available for everybody (not only Mozilla Reps and employees) on our Wiki.

I am terribly excited about this as it means I can “crowd source” myself much more. It means of course that I will speak less at conferences myself, but that had to be done anyways. I will also sync some of this effort with Speaking Out and the Women of Mozilla programs.

Good times ahead.

Photo by Ben Dalton

A wise man said that the only constant is change.
Personally I found I wasted a lot of time lately.
Reasoning with myself, I came to a few conclusions.
I need to stop concentrating on the open web.
Learning this was tough, but it makes sense.

Free software and open systems are stifling.
Open means in a lot of cases lack of innovation.
Open also means that you need to support the past.
Looking at closed innovation, I get jealous.
So I came to the conclusion to only care about mobile.

Let’s face it – surveys show that 7 out of 10 people own at least one brand new mobile device and the others are just saving money to catch up. Innovation happens in closed environments and the real changes that make a difference only happen when new hardware comes out. Now for example we have to re-do all the graphics we had done in the past because of higher resolutions. There is no way end users should suffer a blurry display as we were not insightful enough to prepare for this. Desktops are a dying breed and there is no point in thinking that way any longer.

In the end there should be one platform, one browser engine and one device manufacturer. The web also needs one company to own it so we can innovate and concentrate on building delightful experiences instead of dealing with implementation differences. True, connectivity is an issue, but once we allow companies to step up and control that instead of meddling data protection people and governments that shouldn’t be an issue either.

It is also true that not everybody can afford buying new devices all the time, but let’s think about that: in the end we need to make money from our work, so why target people who don’t have enough money? We could just define our market and make apps that are delightful and beautiful and use all the newest features our users deserve and make sure to keep a constant flow of apps out there. If it is more than a month old, discard it and get a new version. We have to move on! Iteration is for whiners.

Talking about making money: I am aware that a lot of people come here for old articles and information I gave out free. That will change soon – there will be a small fee to access the old content and I will add DRM to the upcoming articles. I got to make ends meet and get the money to buy new devices, too.
I just need to find a way to bill you. As we all know Paypal is evil and hate everybody, so I will probably go with Square. This means of course that only US visitors can pay, so for the time being Europeans and Asian visitors will get creative commons licensed pictures of cats. If you are honest with yourself, you should move to the States anyways as there is no innovation or opportunities outside the valley.

Which also brings me to a personal change that will happen. I’ve been following the rise of “brogrammers” for quite a while now and I love it. American education systems and its concept of sororities and fraternities is a beacon of light and something every market should encourage and copy. As I am too old to be a “brogrammer” I thought it would be a good opportunity to coin a new term. From now on I shall be a Jockleader – it mixes the sexiness and inspiration of a cheerleader with the stamina, determination and competitiveness of a jock. In other words, a pack of awesome.

I am sure you understand, there is no way I can waste my time any longer. Future friendly is for pussies, we need to stalk and bear-hug the future. Maybe high-five it, too.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Man dressed as batman caught speeding by police – turns out he is frequently going to the kids’ hospital to inspire the cancer patients to fight. This is a real tear jerker
• Nine Inch Nails performing at Dance Party USA – someone found an old VHS recording and Trent Reznor commented pointing out Skrillex owes him some publishing for the hairdo. This is almost as good as Trent playing with Slam Bamboo abd being thanked for being a lovely man for helping them out
• Sit or Squat is a public toilet finder – this might sound mundane but as a frequent traveler this is a damn good app (via @yaellevey)
• World Map of Metal bands per 100,000 people – no comment
• Infinite transition delays seem to be a fun CSS trick to create interaction
• The US wind map is a very lovely visualisation of live(?) data
• Responsive Web Design: missing the point is a well-written reminder of what Future Friendly really means
• Mattew Wilcox on responsive images is a long, but indexed screencast showing some of the techniques
• Love Hotels and Unicode is a long and good post on UTF-8
• Stop solving problems you don’t yet have by Rachel Andrew is another good reminder to keep things simple

This is a small preview of a new thing we are working on in Mozilla. The Evangelism Reps program involves Mozillians getting help, mentoring and training to become public speakers, start blogging and running local events. All of this will be open and available on the Wiki. So here is a sneak peek.

How to create screencasts

Screencasts are amazingly powerful things. There is nothing better than showing how to use a tool or write a certain piece of code. There are several different types of screencasts:

• Soundless screencasts – these just show how to do something. They can be one-off things for Twitter to show a certain effect. For example showing how something looks for browsers that might not support it: demo canvas cropper. These are also great for presentations. Instead of live using a product and wasting time typing in data you can run the screencast and give the audience a blow-by-blow explanation what is happening
• Spoken screencasts – instead of just showing you explain what is happening. A demo would be the introduction to the 3D tester
• Personal screencasts with overlaid video or cutting betweeen video and demonstration – these are the most complex to do as you also need to look good and exciting. This is the most personal screencast type.

Regardless of which you go for, you should prepare and know your tools so here are some tips on how to do screencasts.

Preparation

• Get yourself a headset – the main reason is that your voice will be much clearer and you don’t have the issue of the mic recording feedback or outside noises like keyboard clicks. I use the Plantronics 655, which is affordable and comfy to wear
• Turn off any social media channels and email clients on your computer – you don’t want any instant notifications popping up on the screen. You record now, this is all that should go on.
• Have a script ready that you want to follow – this includes what you want to talk about and to have all the things open that you want to show. Loading times of apps and sites you want to show in your screencast is wasted time.
• Be prepared to record a few times as you will get stuck from time to time. You can stitch together one screencast from various steps.
• Take breaks – don’t try to record everything at once. When you are ready with one section, pause recording, have a sip of coffee or a walk and then come back – you’ll sound much fresher.
• Speak clear and at a moderate pace. There is nothing more frustrating than a screencast where the presenter mumbles or is too fast to follow
• You can record the screencast and then record your audio – in a lot of cases this will have better results
• Plan your screencast and show only what is needed. Screencasts should follow a few rules
  • Be short – nobody wants to listen to hours of talk. If you can keep it under 3 minutes – win. You can also cut up longer topics into several screencasts
  • Be indexed – you should offer time stamps for people to jump to when covering a few topics so that more advanced viewers can, for example, skip basics
  • Be easy to watch – remember that not everybody will see the screencast fullscreen, but embedded. Thus use a larger font size in your editor and make examples that don’t rely on low contrast or pixel-precision. Especially video conversion will blur a lot
  • Be relevant – show what can be done, not what people need to set up to get there – this could be accompanying text info.

Recording tools

There are a few tools to do screencasts. Many are free, but it makes sense to spend some money as you avoid hosting issues and watermarking or limited features.

Screenr

If you don’t want to install anything, you can use screenr to record a screencast on any computer. Screenr is a Java Applet that allows you to define a part of the screen to record and gives you five minutes of screencast time. It can record the audio from your microphone, too. You sign up with Twitter and the videos are hosted on screenr.com for embedding. You can also download the MP4 and directly send it to YouTube.

The downside of Screenr is the five minute limit, that you can not edit the final screencast and that you need to crop a certain part of the screen rather than have a full screen recording that can be cropped and shifted afterwards. You can stop and start the recording though.

iShowU

iShowU is a very minimalistic screen recorder for mac that allows you to define a section of the screen and follow the mouse cursor. For $20 is it pretty cheap and does the trick.

Screenflow (recommended)

Screenflow is very much worth the $99 it costs. As you can see in the demos on how to use it it records the whole screen and you can then crop to what you need. You have several tracks to edit and shift and you can annotate your screencast and have effects to transition in between sections of it. Screenflow exports to YouTube or various local formats. I really got to like screenflow as it also allows you to edit other video and images into your screencasts easily.

Publishing

Once you done recording, it is time to get your video out there. The simplest way is to upload them to YouTube or Vimeo – both are supported as direct uploads from the apps mentioned here. If you have the chance and bandwidth, export and upload high quality video – you can always make it smaller later, but you can’t make a bad quality video better quality.

Seeing that we are an open company it seems prudent to avoid closed formats. Nobody wants to download a WMV and then have issues playing it. What I normally do is upload the original video to Amazon’s S3 for safekeeping (or use DropBox) and then use vid.ly for conversion. Vid.ly converts any video to 20 formats and redirects the system you watch the video on to the correct format. Notice that free vid.ly accounts are rate limited, so it might be a good plan to use them for conversion, but host the videos yourself – or get a full account.