Better integration with Youtube

First off, Captiontube ties better in with Youtube: you can simply sign in using your Youtube or Google account. And once you have created your captions, then it just takes you one click to add the caption to the Youtube video -simple and fast, which is how we like it.

Interface

The interface, while similar to the the one of Overstream, does seem much nicer, if you ask me, although that’s of course a judgement call. To the left is your YouTube video and in the right hand pane you have a button Add Caption, which will insert your caption wherever the playhead’s located. Next to it, there’s a button with which you can determine the exact point in time when you want the caption to disappear from screen.

Below everything is a timeline that displays which captions occur when -you can easily adjust the zoom settings using the slider to the left. Even more to the left you can set the language of the captions you are creating, which is a feature Overstream lacks. There’s also the possibility to add as many caption tracks as you like -especially handy if you are creating multiple captions in different languages. This, too, is not possible in Overstream. I do find it a pity that you cannot (yet?) copy and paste tracks so that you wouldn’t have to go through the procedure of adding x captions, tweaking time settings, and so on. A copy & paste feature would allow users to quickly create multiple captions for multiple languages, as they would only need to translate them.

One last thing regarding the interface: the timeline is just one possible view. Click on the List tab if you want to display all of your captions in a list view -especially for a quick review, right before you publish everything, this comes in handy.

Export

As I already said, you can easily upload the captions directly to your YouTube video, but if you want you could also download them to your computer, have them sent to you via email, or copy them to the clipboard. The default option is to upload them directly to YouTube, which does make sense.

My videos

In the top right corner you can find a button that gives you an overview of all your videos -much better than Overstream’s video organization where you have to select your overstream sub in a dropdown menu.

Conclusion

Excellent tool. I see that it’s still in beta, which means that in the future maybe even more features will follow.

Tutorial videos

Getting started

Creating captions

Exporting captions

What is Memolane?

In order to keep things manageable, you can easily create stories -one story for your holiday trip to Italy, another story for a seminar you organised or attended, … you name it. Below you can see a sample story for our workshop on Moodle which took place in Athens 2011. As you can see, it incorporates facebook posts, tweets, youtube videos, and so on. As creator of a story, you have full control over which posts, tweets, videos make it in the timeline.

If you don’t know how to embed a memoline, check out this blog post. If your blog is hosted on WordPress.com, then check out these suggestions.

Below you can find a few tutorial videos on memolane:

Getting started: adding services

Creating, editing, and viewing stories:

Adding and finding friends:

Searching:

Sharing memos

Privacy settings:

In the afternoon we’re going to the archaeological museum. Until that time, we’re having great fun with the different options offered by Moodle’s Groups and Groupings.

The editor has a new Zen mode, where in full-screen mode all the buttons, bells and whistles disappear from the screen (until you move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen again, that’s when the most commonly used functions are accessible again). Like… this:

So tell us…seriously…what could be less distracting than a completely empty page, eh? (Okay, it may also be a bit intimidating if you have writer’s block, but let’s not go there. )

What’s new? Well…it’s a bit faster, again, support for PHP4, old versions of MySQL and Internet Explorer has (finally) been dropped. Without having done any benchmark tests, it feels like pages load somewhat faster, and the administration section seems to be snappier, too. It certainly looks cooler than in the previous version! The default Twenty Eleven theme gives you an idea of some of the possibilities of HTML5, and I’m sure that in the not-so-distant future we’ll see many more themes popping up everywhere that will make the most of HTML5.

And oh yeah, from now on they’ll start doing partial upgrades – no need to upload the entire installation anymore, every time there’s an upgrade. While we at LLIT don’t really have anything to complain about with our current provider, people working elsewhere might not be as lucky as us. (An example, you ask? Well… FTP’ing the contents of an archive as small as that of WordPress from the comfort of your home to the servers there can easily take 4 hours to complete. Obviously the auto-update function doesn’t work, for “security reasons”.)

So far, this upgrade has been a good one – no broken plugins, etc, and everything seems to work just a bit better. Again. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got planned for 3.3…