User experience screencasting with Istanbul just got a whole lot better
So I spent the whole of Friday (thanks Fluendo for giving us 20% time to work on personal projects) and parts of Saturday and Sunday hacking on Istanbul. A lot of work was put in a UI revamp, use of GConf to store preferences (it optionally uses gconf, so don’t worry KDE users), recording of 3d applications and in composited environments including aiglx/compiz and Xgl/compiz and supporting recording of user-selected areas of the screen.
The result is, people like Phil Normand can use Istanbul in seconds and produce lovely screencasts like the one of Elisa here.
I made a screencast of Istanbul screencasting itself. To watch it in an embedded Cortado Java applet, go here or your can download the video from:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~zaheerm/screencasts/istanbul-screencasting-itself.ogg
Thanks to Benjamin Otte for the cool screen area selector widget that I re-wrote in Python for Istanbul, Kiddo for a patch to add gconf support, Luca for filing bugs and patches, Andy Wingo for UI suggestions, Quim Gil for the enthusiasm and suggestions, my wife Alia for bearing with me this weekend while I was coding and many more people!