Category
XPages BOF
Here's a neat new idea that's coming to
a Lotusphere BOF near you!!!
Rather then having a tradition discussion
format, let's create an XPages Game Show. Complete with questions
and PRIZES!!!
Come Wednesday morning at 7:00 to SW
Toucan 2 for:
BOF403 Get Up to Speed on XPages
Show the world you're 'Up to
Speed on XPages"! Participate in this rapid-fire XPages game show
and score BIG within the community! Similar to Lotusphere's SpeedGeeking,
participants will have an opportunity to answer XPages questions from one
of our assessment tests in a game show-type format. After ten questions,
the winner gets an 'Up to Speed on XPages" prize and the host moves
on to the next group of participants. Up to four rounds will be played,
if time permits.
There will be 4 groups, each
with a host to ask questions. Prizes will be awarded for each round
and there's even a grand prize for the person who gets the most correct.
Should be fun!
This is run by IBMers... but
I've been invited to act as a host and help ask questions. If I can I might
even add a couple of very limited edition NotesIn9 items to the prize pool.
Hope to see you there.
P.S. Anyone... Feel free
to call me at 6:45 to wake me up! haha
Category
Cloud
As I type this I'm on an AirTran plane
heading home from Atlanta. I splurged and upgraded myself to Business
class so I could do some actual work. (Don't worry John. Won't
try and expense that. haha)
Currently AirTran has free in flight
wifi sponsored by Google Chrome. Ok that's fun, I'll admit it. So
I fired it up as did 5 others in business class and we all were just surfing
away....
Until it stopped working!!
GogoInternet was reporting the plane
was under 10,000 feet when we were really at 38,000. It wasn't long
before the "natives" got restless. Complaining (even though
it was FREE FREE FREE)... Rebooting... discussion with the
attendants about getting it fixed. The guy across from me is just
staring at the error on his screen and refreshing his browser.
Me? I just switched to my Local replicas
and kept on working.. (and blogging). I had more then enough
with me that it wasn't even a minor inconvenience.
Of course the Cloud is powerful. But
it's not the end all solution because if you can't access it, you're dead
in the water.
Oh the other thing I did was silently
laugh my butt off and said a little thank you to Lotus Notes.
Category
NotesIn9
November has turned into another record
breaking month for NotesIn9. I want to once again thank everybody
for watching. I hope the videos continue to be of value. I
especially want to thank Jeremy Hodge for contributing his Java Series
and also my friends who help me when I get stuck and whose advice typically
gets turned into new shows.
I know my little site is NOT an accurate
measurement of actual interest in XPages technologies. But it's at
least an anecdotal measurement I think. I could be wrong. I
passed statistics class in college on effort alone.
So to those who might be somewhat curious
check this out:
NotesIn9: Extended Edition 1: Introduction to XPages (73
Minutes)
Downloads/Plays
| September
|
311
|
| October
|
478
|
| November
|
827
|
|
|
1616 |
Since this is a pure JumpStart type
video it looks to me like interest in XPages is really growing!
Category
Lotusphere
We're coming up to the time where we're
are going to find out who is selected to speak at Lotusphere and who is
not.
Last year I had the privilege of speaking
at Lotusphere with Declan Lynch on my favorite topic, XPages. I also
got to present at SpeedGeeking. I had a lot of fun, so naturally
I submitted a couple of sessions to speak again. Whether I will or not
I have no idea. XPages is the hot topic this year, so who knows how
I'll stack up from the Lotusphere "Powers that Be".
But I do know this.... If I don't
get selected, I'll be disappointed, but there will be no complaining from
me. What I'm going to do it take the ideas that I've submitted and
turn them into either blog posts or more likely NotesIn9 shows.
My suggestion to anyone is just that...
If you get a session rejected then try and make the best of it and
channel that rejection into something positive. Publish the information
and try and show them what they missed out on. Publishing the information
can only help your changes for next year.
Blog it... if you don't have a
blog put it on the Lotus Wiki's - or contact a regular blogger who might
be happy to post your material for you. If you want to create then
one option would be to make it yourself, put it on YouTube and contribute
to the Lotus VideoFest event.
As an alternative to doing everything
yourself, I'd be happy to take contributions to NotesIn9. If you have a
tip or content that you want to share on the show just let me know and
we can discuss.
The point is, if you're committed to
creating some material to help the community, don't let a rejection letter
from Lotus stop you. They can't stop the Signal - no one can.
Category
Community
One of the neat things about the Lotus
Community is that there are these monthly Web Meetings that take place
on a Tuesday every month.
These meetings are put on by Joyce Davis
of IBM/Lotus. She leads the "Technical Information and Education Community".
How cool is that for a job? Especially in the Social and collaborative
world of today? Basically it seems to be the job of her team to not
only create information to help us do our jobs, but also engage us as partners
to help make that information as good as it can be. One big item
that's near and dear to my heart is the Wiki's. There's TONS of great
content out there. And if anyone reads it and wants to add something
they can either post a comment or edit the post directly. You can't
do that with a printed book!
Anyway, back to the meetings. There's
two Lotus orientated events that I look forward to on a regular basis.
A new video from Matt White's XPages101.net
and the monthly community meeting that Joyce puts on.
Why are these meetings good? For
a couple of reasons really. First, they're only 1 hour, so it's not
a huge time commitment in your day. Second - she almost always starts
out with community announcements. With as busy as things can get
it's easy to miss some happenings. So that's a good chance to catch
up. Third - She brings in two members from the community for a brief
introduction. So it's good to put a voice to some of the people that
you might only deal with via email or chat. That's kind of fun. Then
lastly there's always the "Meat" of the meeting. A 30-40ish
minute topic by someone. Bruce and Julian came on once on how to
Podcast, there's been XPages Topics, VideoFest was last month, always something
different. To me it's usually something that's interesting but unknown
enough to me that I probably couldn't easily get that information any other
way. So it's valuable. In addition there's a side chat that
I like hanging out it. Helping to answer or ask questions or on occasion
to just be a little silly. All in all it's a fun hour that I look
forward to.
Speaking of a fun hour. Did you know that
the next meeting is tommorrow? 10:00am EST? This should be another good
one.
From the spotlight 2 personal friends
of mine will be on - Jeremy Hodge and Paul Hannan. Jeremy's been
very kind to me to contribute quality shows on Java programming to NotesIn9.
Paul is a great guy who works for IBM in the XPages group who lives
in Ireland and last year went out of his way to help my 10 year old daughter
with a school project she was doing on Ireland.
Is this community great or what?
If you're involved in Lotus Technologies,
and if you're reading my blog you probably are, I would just suggest that
it benefits you to participate in the community as much as possible. I
know I've already gotten in return so much more then I'll EVER put back
in.
Category
XPages
Just about anybody who has used XPages
has probably at some point or another tried to use the documentation
and found it.... let's just say "lacking".
Well now's the time to do something
positive to try and improve it. It looks like THIS WEEK there's a
discussion about this over at LotusUserGroup.org.
Please take some time and head here to discuss
ways to improve the XPages documentation.
I figure it's like voting, if you don't
take time to try and improve it, then you don't get to complain about it
later. haha
Category
NotesIn9
I don't focus too much on stats, but even
I couldn't miss the fact that downloads of the NotesIn9 videos are
going through the roof. I was always really happy with the response,
but as it stands now we're very close to doubling my previous best month
ever way back in February 2010.
I'm seeing a substantial increase in
the older shows, especially the XPages episodes are reaching new monthly
highs, but I'm really surprised how many downloads I'm seeing on the 3
new Extended Edition Shows. The first one that I did was a 73 minute
Introduction to XPages, and then Jeremy Hodge came on board to add two
longer shows on introducing Java to the XPages developers. I always
thought that since everyone is so busy that the 9 minute show was the perfect
length. But these three shows are being way way above the average activity
of a normal show.
What does anyone think? Do you
prefer the longer format so the topics are more in depth? Or do you
prefer the shorter format?
I want to thank Jeremy Hodge for his
contributions on the Java shows - don't worry I'm already bugging him to
continue the Java series. haha
I guess one of the purposes of this
post is to try and highlight that in my little corner of the world, I'm
starting to see a significant uptick in XPages interest.
The other point is this is that I just
wanted to thank everybody for their interest in the show. I really
appreciate it. There's a lot more in the works - more Java shows
from Jeremy, improvements to XPages.TV, more
NotesIn9 shows, and maybe even a couple of surprises.
Thanks again!
Category
VideoFest
With IBM's launch of their VideoFest event
today I thought I'd take a couple of minutes to describe my process of
creating the NotesIn9 screencasts in case
that might help anyone.
Keep in mind that I like to add slides
to my screencasts and attempt to keep the same feel that a Lotusphere session
might have. Slides aren't a requirement for VideoFest and there are
a lot of great videos out there that don't have slides.
I've found that the key to getting the
best quality is to pay attention to the video resolution. I use 1280x720
because that's a pure High Definition resolution, 720p technically, and
YouTube supports that very well. I assume/hope that most of the NotesIn9
audience have monitors that are bigger then 1024x768 these days, so it
should fit on their screens pretty well.
So the key is, to record in 1280x720
and then NEVER do anything to change the resolution. Otherwise the
screen text will get fuzzy. If I were on a pure Windows machine,
then prior to recording I'd change my resolution to 1280x720. If
that resolution isn't listed specifically there are ways to add a custom
resolution. Google is your friend. It should be noted that
if you're on a laptop, where that's not the NATIVE resolution, it might
look fuzzy when you record it, but should look fine when you view it in
your native resolution.
Anyway, I'm on a Mac so I use virtual
machines. I size my VM to 1280x720 and call that done. For my slides
I use KeyNote with a template that's sized specifically to 1280x720.
For capturing I use ScreenFlow. It's
not too expensive, and does a good job with what it does. You can
get really fancy with it, but other then an occasional text popup I don't
get too fancy with ScreenFlow.
The way ScreenFlow works, is it captures
your entire monitor. I usually record on a monitor that's larger
then 1280x720 so after recording I go into ScreenFlow and crop the video
to 1280x720 and then move the VM or slide image into that cropped area.
Very easy to do.
When it comes to recording, I almost
always record the demo first. Since I like to do both slides and
demos, I've found that if the demo runs longer then I thought, it's easier
for me to adjust the content of the slides to fit in the 9ish minute goal.
After I record the demo, I'll then record
the slides. When I get to the demo slide, I'll just pause for a couple
of seconds and then finish out the slides. I'll then go into ScreenFlow
and split the slide clip at that demo slide and then insert the demo in
between.
That's pretty much it really. The
last thing I'll do is add the little 3D domino video to the front and then
I just need to render it. This is where you need to pay attention. Don't
let your software do any scaling. Otherwise it will probably come
out fuzzy.
In this screenshot I set it to scale
to 100% which is NOT the default for some reason. I also change the Preset
to Web - High (Multi-pass). Using multi-pass makes the video iPad
and iPhone4 compatible for some reason. It's like magic.
That's it then. Once rendered
I'll upload it to my hosting provider for NotesIn9 and also to my YouTube
channel if it fits within YouTube's time limit. YouTube used to have
a 10 minute limit, I think it's now been bumped to 15 minutes.
And that's what I do in a nutshell.
While this is a Mac centric guideline,
I imagine the concepts to be similar in a pure windows environment.
Once you do it a couple of times, the
recording the video is really not that difficult. Publishing to something
other then YouTube? That's a different story. haha
If anyone needs any help, drop me a
line and I'll try to assist in anyway that I can.
Happy VideoFesting.
Category
XPages
This Friday on the This Week in
Lotus podcast I announced the creation of a new website for
all to use.
XPages.TV
My intention for this site is to be
the home of not just the NotesIn9 shows about XPages topics, but that
is will contain links to any other videos about XPages on the net. One
of the problems with NotesIn9 in it's current form, is that older shows
are still relevant, but might not be easy to find due to the date driven
nature of a podcast.
So my intention with XPages.TV is to
not just collect XPages videos, but to tag and categorize them and create
more of a table of contents of all the XPages Videos. So if you're
interested in Repeat Controls, you'll find all the videos that talk about
Repeat Controls, etc... Eventually there will be links to openNTF, the
Lotus Product Wikis, etc...
The site is FAR from finished so far,
but I thought that since NotesIn9 is a big contributor in itself, there
wasn't much need to wait. So I have all those videos there with one additional
link so far. No categories yet, but I'll get there.
I hope this will prove helpful to the
community in the long run.
Thanks!
Category
XPages
I've been trying to clean up a couple of
things inside the NotesIn9 Studios. I'm still remastering old shows
to make them iPad and iPhone4 compatible and looking for improvements to
my backend workflow which is WAY more painful then it should be. doh!
Anyway, I while I was at it I thought
I'd post an updated list of all the NotesIn9 shows that are related specifically
to XPages.
001 - Repeat Controls
002
- Busting the Rip and Replace Myth
003 – Basic Searching
004 –
Intro to Scoped Variables
006 – A
Blueprint to XPages
007 – A
License to TypeAhead
009
– Viewer Questions on XPages
011 –
BluePrint and UI Layout
013 – XPages and
XML
014 – Repeats
Repeated
015 – Questions
from Twitter
016
– Creating an Agent Framework
017
– Control Rendering in XPages
018
– XPages: Data Relationships
019
– Xpages: Getting Column Totals From a View
And because it had to happen at some
point, here are the 3 shows in the Extended edition series. If you
really are completely new with XPages I suggest starting with Episode 1
as it's a pure Introduction to XPages. It's about 73 minutes long
so make sure you're sitting down. This is basically a replay of the
Intro session that I did at MWLug this year.
EE
001: Introduction to XPages
Extended Edition 002: Introduction to Java
for XPages Developers Part 1
Extended Edition 003: Intro to Java for XPages Developers
Part 2
Thanks for watching!!!
- 
