Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

HelpXplain is the exciting new animated infographics and screencast tool that integrates with Help+Manual.

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Martin Wynne
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Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

How to add/insert a screencast into an existing Xplain? To create a screencast it appears to be necessary to start a new Xplain?

Shouldn't there be a Start Screencast option under Home > New Slide?

I can create a screencast in a separate instance of HX, but how to append/insert one Xplain in another?

Simply copying and pasting multiple slides appears to overlay them on the existing slides as additional objects.

cheers,

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Select the slide where you want to start or continue a screencast, then select Screencast in the Picture tool dropdown in the Home tab. :)
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Tim Green wrote:Select the slide where you want to start or continue a screencast, then select Screencast in the Picture tool dropdown in the Home tab. :)
Thanks Tim, I missed that.

But that seems to be in the wrong place -- the Picture functions are surely intended to apply to the current slide?

It would be more logical to insert a screencast under Home > New Slide.

cheers,

Martin.
Tim Frost
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Re: Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Tim Frost »

I agree. I had abandoned screencasts after my initial experiments because I came to the conclusion that the rule had to be one Xplain, one screencast. It was clear to me that since no 'screencast' was shown when I clicked on New Slide, the only way to create a screencast was to start from a new Xplain with a new template. And I was unable to copy and paste slides successfully from one template to another. So I decided to give up on screencasts until this curious limitation of version 1 had been resolved! Which it now has been.

Now I know the trick is to create a blank slide, then go to a completely different menu and insert a screencast, it begins to be clear. But I still do not understand why there is no 'screencast' as an option in the New Slide pulldown!

This also leads me to another observation about the example Xplains, which may be one reason why I missed what is now clear. I found the self-referential Xplains too confusing to spend a lot of time on. I feel that the tutorial Xplains would be much easier to read if, for example, you illustrated a slide with a picture of an elephant with and without filling the browser window, than than with a picture of the truncated text of how to 'fill browser window'. The xPlain instructions can obviously be xPlain screenshots, but would be clearer outside a real-world example, not as the example itself. Just a thought!
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

I agree that the self-referential samples and tutorials are confusing to follow. It is not always clear whether you are being shown how to do something, or the end result of doing it. Knowing now a bit more about HX it is possible to untangle the two, but in the early days of Goalfish it was often a mystery to follow what was happening on the screen. Newcomers to HX may still feel the same way.

It would be better as tutorials to show HX being used to make a demo about a completely different program, maybe H&M? Or something more pictorial such as how to do perspective corrections in GIMP ( https://www.gimp.org ), say?

cheers,

Martin.
Last edited by Martin Wynne on Wed Jul 17, 2019 11:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Martin Wynne wrote:how to append/insert one Xplain into another?
Answering my own question, it is possible to Select All and copy the slides from one instance of HX, and paste into another instance of HX, via the Slides Overview main windows.

Then while they are still selected, you can right-click and Move Up, or others down, to get them in the required position in the sequence.

This way you can make and edit several short Xplains, and then assemble them into a much longer one.

But much better would be something on the File menu to import/insert/append an .xplain file in one go.

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Re: Adding a screencast to existing Xplain?

Unread post by Tim Green »

But that seems to be in the wrong place -- the Picture functions are surely intended to apply to the current slide?
It would be more logical to insert a screencast under Home > New Slide.
Good point. This kind of thing is easy to miss during development since in that context you always know where something is and you're never confronted with the situation of seeing it "fresh". Will be taken into consideration.

On the self-referential tutorials: Also something I became aware of a little too late. Redoing them would have been a major cost factor but there won't be any more of them. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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