Apolon's Software Torq

The following video is part of a submission to Syncfusion on some requested improvements to their Essential Diagram product. Though it seems like it recently, I won’t be burying this blog with videos related to product support. It’s just convenient to visually describe a problem or a functionality request and not have to be worried about compressing the video enough to get through file attachment limits on a particular support site. The Syncfusion support system has a 2MB limit for attachments which is reasonable for coding related files.. Unfortunately video files (even screencasts) can quickly get over 2MB with very little audio or resolution. It seems like video, both the production and viewing of it, is going to drive the need for more powerful processors, more memory, more disk space and more bandwidth in the coming years. So even if today’s PCs seem plenty powerful, there’s plenty of demand for more power in the video driven applications.

Posted by Apolon at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

I discovered a strange display problem when using a Syncfusion based application layered over the top of iTunes. Occassionally the whole application window gets repainted if an iTunes window is below it. It happened when interacting with their advanced tab control and the iTunes window was below it. See the video on the blog web site for a demo of the problem. This has been posted mainly to have an easy way to describe the problem for the Syncfusion support department. I don’t know whether it’s a Syncfusion or an iTunes issue at this stage.

Posted by Apolon at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

As mentioned in a previous post, there are some good free video hosting services around these days but there are pros and cons with using them. The approach that will be taken now is to use a hosting company with good value for both disk space and bandwidth usage plus the addition of a flash based video player hosted on a torq site. The expected bandwidth volume isn’t high (i.e. not consumer level volumes) so taking this approach is reasonable. I toyed with idea of developing a flash video player in house, but its hard to beat the value inherent in something like wimpyplayer.com. This blog post includes the embedding of a pre-existing screen cast, this time at 640x480 resolution. There’s also been additions to the main menu of the torq web site. Soon these will be augmented by videos from the MacroView 2006 User Group which was a great success.

Posted by Apolon at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post