Though my initial experiments with Wink seemed promising as I tried to use it for more tutorials I ran into problems. After what I thought was a good take for a particular demo it crashed and lost my work. Then I did it again and the rendered content audio sounded slow and very deep, unintelligible.

So I downloaded the trial version of Camtasia Studio. It lasts 30 days fully functional and I think I'm going to have to buy it. It seems more feature rich and most importantly stable.

Here is the second take of a tutorial I did with Wink after the first take crashed

then I re-did it with Camtasia as seen here

It was an unscripted session both times I think I probably did a better take in Wink but the quality of the result with Camtasia is much better it seems to me.

Hopefully Wink will improve over time, I'll certainly keep my eye on it, but I need something more robust if I'm going to spend my time creating tutorials so it looks like I will pony up the dough for Camtasia soon, it seems very impressive to me.

Todd Stone nudged me to try Wink, a free demo/tutorial creation tool that allows you to do screen capture and audio capture to produce Flash movies. I finally got around to it just now and tested it by making a quick demo of the mojoPortal personalization features. Click here to watch it.

So far I'm really impressed with Wink, its easy to use. The audio sounds a little broken up but not too bad. I'm using a really good mic and preamp, I think its just the compression that makes it sound a little choppy. I used the web safe color palette to help make the file a little smaller. Wink outputs both the.swf Flash file and a .htm file to host the Flash movie.



I'm definitely going to do more tutorials this way, hopefully I will get better at it as I go. The personalization demo I did today was unscripted and done mainly as a test to get the audio levels right.

Update: I moved the .swf file for this tutorial over to my google pages site to reduce load on the web server hosting this site since the file is almost 6MB. IE doesn't seem to want to play the movie because the html page is not in the same domain as the movie file. This is probably a security feature of IE. If you are having this trouble use this link instead, it goes directly to the .swf file and IE seems willing enough to load it without a page wrapped around it.

As you may know if you've been following my posts and the progress of this project the 2.x branch of mojoPortal has not been able to work under Mono and has been waiting for things to progress in the Mono 2.0 ASP.NET stack.

Last night with Mono built from svn r73211, for the first time a few pages in mojoPortal 2.x do work! There are still errors to be fixed but this is the first time I've been able to get any pages to work. This is very encouraging progress, I am very excited because I feel we are getting very close now to having the 2.x version working on Mono.

I will say that I had to comment out the menu binding code to get the site working at all because there is still some work to do to correctly support custom SiteMapProviders in Mono, but I was able to get to the home page and I was able to login.

Big Thanks to Marek Habersack for all the great work he is doing in Mono to help us along!

There is still a tunnel but I can see light at the end of it!



Joe

I've been thinking for a long time that we really need a walk through tutorial showing how to implement a custom feature that plugs into mojoPortal. This will be very helpful in making mojoPortal even more popular among developers.

So I've decided to write a tutorial as I implement the e-commerce feature. I've been taking notes and screen shots as I go and will probably put up a page with the beginnings of this tutorial soon for anyone who wants to follow my progress. The tutorial will evolve along with the feature. Those of you working regularly with the svn code will see my checkins and can follow my progress there too.

I'm implementing the e-commerce feature as an external module outside of the core of mojoPortal. I think this will be the most popular approach for third party developers because with your code separate from the core, you can do svn update on the core without touching your feature. So implementing a complex feature like this and having the code and the tutorial available should get most developers up to speed faster.

I've already stubbed out the needed projects and created the module control that will be the entry point to the store and plug into the content system. Its in svn branches/2.x

I've just released a new set of files version 2.2.1.5

If you are upgrading from a previous version, this is the last time you will need to run any upgrade scripts for the database. Next time that will happen automatically due to the new schema detection and upgrading system I implemented in this release.

So this time you do have to run the upradefrom2-2-1to2-2-1-5.sql
but next time there will be no need for this.

This will also make it easier for those working from svn branches/2.x as your db schema will also upgrade automatically whenever I check in new upgrade scripts.

If using MS SQL or PostgreSQL you need to also run the stored procedure script (this step also will not be needed going forward)

As always be sure and backup both your site and your db before upgrading and post in the foums if you run into any troubles.

Thanks to all for reporting bugs and making suggestions to help improve mojoPortal.
Thanks especially to Alexander Yushchenko for providing a lot of great QA and code review as well as patches.

Work continues on the Mono front. We are making progress but still have issues to work through. We are getting good help from the Mono Team, especially Marek Habersack. Thanks!