Posted by Alex · June 27th, 2008
We are in week 7 of the Spread the Craft contest, and I can tell everyone right now that this is going to be a tough decision! There are some stellar videos entered. If you still haven’t, head on over and check out some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious crafting lessons. All of the MindBites in the contest are currently free, and you can learn how to make resin jewelry, create crackle-finished pottery, make your own exercise machine, sew handy remote storage, create a rockstar pin, give old spoons a new life, make soap, reuse your #6 plastic, stencil the Ninja way, make baby sign language flashcards, and find a cool use for old records! While you are learning new skills, make sure you vote for your favorite crafting MindBite. The People’s Choice voting will decide the winner of $500. Current People’s Choice Leaders are…: 1. Make Your Own Baby Sign Language Flashcards 2. How To Craft Your Own Exercise Machine 3. DIY Shrinky Dinks Remember-you can vote for one entry everyday, so come back and vote again to ensure your favorite crafter wins! You do have to register as a user to vote, so that we can make sure you are only voting once a day. Voting continues on until August 1st. And, of course, you should enter the contest!
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Tags: contest, craft, MindBites, spread the craft | Posted in MindBites News and Notes | No Comments »
Posted by Eric · June 24th, 2008
This information on basic lighting is for those out there who want to take your videos or MindBites to the next level. There are items you probably have around your house that can help the lighting in your video look better. If you don’t have these items around, a trip to the local hardware store will get you what you need for a reasonable price. Cheap is good. Even one 75 watt light from a hardware store can make a difference, especially, if you are showing a process or detail of an object. This is what you need:
- Extension cord, power strip,
- 1-3 Lights with Clips (3 lights if you want to try 3 point lighting, however, 1 light is better than nothing!). These lights need bulbs with wattage ranging from 75 watts-150 watts
- 300 watt dimmer
- hand clamp
- white card board, white foam board or white poster board, 3′x4′ in size or there abouts
- Colored gels-a transparent, colored sheet of think plastic-like material used to color light. This item is not at hardware stores, but can be purchased online for relatively cheap from any lighting manufacturer or equipment rental company.
- Clothes pins for clipping gels to lights
Mounting the lights will depend on your area, and what is near your subject. For example, if you are near a door way, then clip the light on the door or door frame. A table or window sill works too. If there are no ledges or surfaces on which to clip the lights, then the back of a chair or (my favorite) a 5′-6′ ladder works well. The ladder has many purposes, it can be used as a light stand or for clamping a white board/bounce card.
Where to position your lights?
If you follow this basic 3 point lighting scheme, your video will look more on the pro side than ever before. This diagram below can give you a basic idea. It’s a good practice to get your subject, or yourself far away from the background as possible. This is important because it helps to separate what you are filming from the background, giving the shot more depth. Do your best, I know this can sometimes be impossible due to the limitation of shooting space.
White Balance?
White Balance (WB) can get pretty complex and I won’t go too deep into it because most cameras have a built in white balance. However, doing it manually usually gets better results. Basically, White Balancing is setting the way the camera processes the Red, Green and Blue (RGB) or primary colors in your scene so that all the different color tones between RGB are accurate. So blue looks blue and red looks red and all the other colors are adjusted to their true tone as what the naked eye would see. I suggest that you play around it until you are comfortable with doing it and even compare it to the camera’s auto white balance.
How to set the WB?
After your lights and camera are set up:
- Turn off any light with a colored gel because the color will throw off your white balance and colors will not appear in their true value
- Take a blank white paper or poster board and place it in front of your subject
- Zoom in with the camera to where the white card fills up the entire frame, focus, then push your WB button (this may vary between cameras) usually, cameras have this WB icon that will flash then stop once it’s set:
Once the White Balance is set then you are ready to record!
Check out the new MindBites Insight video on Basic Lighting for more information on lighting materials and techniques.
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Tags: Authors, cheap lighting, MindBites Insight, Video Production, Webisode, white balancing | Posted in General, Video Production and Publishing | No Comments »
Posted by Alex · June 13th, 2008
Hello crafters! We have some exciting contest news…We are extending the deadline for the Spread the Craft Contest Due to several requests/complaints about the short amount of time left to shoot a video (seems like summer vacations have taken up lots of crafting time!), we have extended the deadline to July 21st! That is four additional weeks to register, upload, and Spread the Craft! The new date to announce the winner will be August 5th.
Second major announcement of the day: People’s Choice Voting Begins TODAY! That’s right! We’ve moved up the date for voting because, well, it just made sense. If you are entering the contest, you are excited and want to tell everyone to ‘vote for me!’ And they should be able to go view your video and vote. So, now they can. Anyone registered as a user on the MindBites website can login and vote for one video, once a day, everyday, until August 1st. So….tell your friends, family, the entirety of the crafting community to login and vote for you!
And now for a little MindBites fun…because we have been busy having lots of fun with this contest. We’ve got a few craft contest videos for you.
First, I’d like to present to you Thug’Nit, a MindBites production:
And my personal favorite, Thug’Nit 2: Nit Off (another MindBites production):
And remember to check out (and vote for) some of our great contest entries, such as…
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Tags: contest, crafting, spread the craft | Posted in General, MindBites News and Notes | No Comments »
Posted by Alex · June 10th, 2008
On Sunday, June 1st Craft: Magazine threw an issue release party here in Austin at The Work*Shop. Brittanie and I, as resident crafty ladies, went and had an all-around good time! The party was hosted by Rachel Hobson, an Austin crafty blogger better known as Average Jane Crafter, and Leslie Bonnell of Stitch Lab. The party was great, with a few celebrity crafters (such as Jenny Hart, Vicki Howell, and other member of the Austin Craft Mafia), yummy treats, fantastic door prizes (Brittanie won a CUTE necklace from Naughty Secretary Club!), and a fun little project from Susan Beal’s new book, Bead Simple.
Brittanie also shot a little footage of the party, and put together this mini-bite about the project:
I didn’t win a door prize, but I did indulge myself in a subscription of Craft:. And I got to meet a lot of local crafters and take home a cute bracelet that I made myself! As an added bonus, we got to announce to a group of Austin crafters the Spread the Craft Contest! Remember to register and upload your crafting instructional video for a chance to win $1000!
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Posted by wynn · June 4th, 2008
With our shiny new iPhone site ready for public consumption, we thought we’d share some things we learned while building it.
1. Design from a blank slate
Less is more. On a mobile device (even as one as powerful as the iPhone), users have less screen and typically less time than desktop users. We found it easier to start fresh and ask ourselves what are the most important pieces of the site for mobile users. For MindBites, viewing video lessons is the core activity, so we started there.
Keep it familiar. Familiarity breeds contempt contentment for your iPhone users, especially if they are regulars on your main site as well. We started by simply putting our main site navigation into the iPhone style list menus. As we banged around on the site, we quickly discovered what worked and what didn’t. For instance, long lists work better in a dropdown menu since the iPhone GUI handles them so well.
Stand on some shoulders. Don’t reinvent the jogdial. Find and use mobile sites you like for ideas on how to present your site’s content. Go beyond the home page glossy logo and really use iPhone sites and make notes on what you like and what you find frustrating.
But distinguish yourself. Imitate (even steal) but don’t become a clone in the process. The rise of great iPhone toolkits has made it easy to create great looking sites that look like native iPhone apps. Make sure that someone will remember your site though, and that it doesn’t blend into all the other sites out there that look like a Settings Menu applet.
Innovate! The Mobile Web is still nascent. Try and push the envelope a little.
2. You can use the tools you already know
HTML. Sure native apps are coming, and I’m sure I’ll be dropping more coin in iTunes for some slick looking non-browser based titles, but the success of the iPhone as a platform has been because anyone who can make a web site can make a compelling iPhone site using tools they already know. No special tags, no proprietary plugin aftertaste.
I have seen the future and it is CSS3. As developers, we found it strangely liberating to style the site using cutting edge Cascading Style Sheet features and not have to worry about how it would look in Internet Explorer. Features like multiple background images, border images, and drop shadows shave hours off of some tasks.
JavaScript (jQuery is the jBomb). We love jQuery. It makes JavaScript suck less - even fun. One handy plugin we used was the jQuery iPhone plugin which neatly wraps up handling screen orientation changes, hiding the address bar, and smoother animations.
3. Take advantage of the device
Handle orientation changes gracefully. One of the cool features of the iPhone is how it flips the screen from portrait to landscape as you rotate it in your hand. Handling these events in your code allows you to adapt the page layout for either tall or wide layouts to provide a better user experience.
Embed video for better playback Most sites don’t do video, but if you do, look into using the embed element to embed your streamable video content directly on the page instead of linking to it. In either approach, the iPhone will play your content in the iPod media player, however when you embed your video directly, the user is gracefully returned to your site instead of a blank page.
4. Mobile Networks are the new 56k modem
Design for range of speeds, but keep lowest common denominator in mind. Just like you can’t assume all users of your main site have their own fiber line, you need to ensure your site loads quickly for users on slower networks. When serving video, Apple recommends using QuickTime reference videos that allow you to serve different quality media to users on networks of different speeds.
Package up your assets and make every kilobyte count! As developers we like to keep things tidy. Modular files help keep stylesheets and scripts neatly organized. For users on a slow network, waiting on ten separate files to download instead of one large one can be a royal pain. As a Rails site, we used the excellent asset packager plugin to bundle, pack, and zip our styles and scripts.
I like the (CSS) Sprite in YOU! CSS Sprites are better than the Taste of Lymon®! An old animation trick, sprites allow you to preload frames in a sequence. In CSS we can apply the concept to cram all of our icons into one big image instead of thirty itty-bitty images. The savings? Twenty-nine network connections back to the server and seconds off of your load time. We used this approach for the icons in our menus.
5. Test, Use, Tweak, Evolve
Use simulators to test quickly. Technically, you don’t even need an iPhone to develop an iPhone site (shhhh! don’t tell your manager). In the early stages, you can use Safari 3.1 or iPhoney to simulate the site without having to straddle the keyboard and your iPhone dock.
But, there is No substitute for actual lab rats with iPhones. I wouldn’t want to fly with a pilot who hasn’t logged any hours outside the simulator. Your users don’t want to use an iPhone site that hasn’t been tested on the actual device on all types of network connections. Need specimens? Draft iPhone owners from within your community for better feedback.
Agile is your friend - aim for simple, simplify from there, and improve over time. Launch the site as soon as it adds value. We launched our site without allowing users to even login and play their purchased lessons. We added that capability in phase two. In the weeks to come, you’ll be able to buy lessons on the iPhone without even visiting the main site. Stay tuned!
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Tags: app development, iPhone, iPhone app, site development | Posted in Techy | 3 Comments »
Posted by Jason · June 3rd, 2008
We’re pleased to announce the release of the iPhone/iPod version of the MindBites site, complete with on-demand remote access to all the lessons in the MindBites library. Now you can access innovative video instructional materials wherever and whenever you need them, including titles like Roadside Bike Flat Repair, Last Minute Toast Tips, or Emergency Beer Opening Techniques. iPhone/iPod users can check out this first of it’s kind instructional site simply by visiting mindbites.com on their device.
Here’s a quick demo of the MindBites iPhone site we recorded:
The iPhone version of the MindBites site highlights special Mobile Picks, offers easy site navigation, and enables the viewing of any videos available on the MindBites site, including those previously purchased.
To celebrate the release of this iPhone site, as well as the one year anniversary of the iPhone, MindBites is making a special set of “Mobile Pick” lessons available for free viewing, including:
Our mission has always been to help you learn what you need directly from those who know. Since we are often out-and-about when the urge or need to learn something arises, the ability to access instructional materials wherever and whenever you need them is key. Now by leveraging the iPhone/iPod mobile web platform, we are able to give authors the ability to publish lessons through the MindBites platform and make them available anywhere at any time.
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the iPhone as well as the rumored launch of the new 3G iPhone, all of this week, we’ll be posting about our experiences with the iPhone, building our iPhone site, and why we think the iPhone web experience is revolutionary.
Note: iPhone and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc. And we’re pretty sure Steve Jobs now owns the rights to any words that begin with the letter “i”.
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