johnc: NetBeans, Web Analysis, and Random Ramblings

Give my Flash demo life!!! Yes, I've finally gotten on the bandwagon and produced a Flash demo:

http://testwww.netbeans.org/kb/41/j2ee-demo.html

The NetBeans docs team will be expected to do a lot more of these, so this was basically an exercise in getting to know the tool, Macromedia Captivate.

Well, Captivate's a lot better than its open-source cousin, Wink, but making a Flash demo was still a major pain. First of all, I figured out quick that it pays to have a well-thought out script for your demo before you begin - get all of the voice-over and all of the actions you'll do in the demo written down. Then, as Vince says, it's good to take screen grabs after you've done some typing and especially when switching between wizard pages or opening submenus. Captivate tended not to get all of the typing or the change in screens.

The most annoying part was definitely the sound. I tried using Captivate's sound functionality, but it was totally lame. You've got a sound clip that spans over three or four slides, and instead of leaving the clip as one mp3 file and spanning it over the slides, it cuts it up into one mp3 file for each slide. Of course, once the sound clip is split up it's impossible to make any of the slides longer or shorter without introducing gaps in the sound. Pretty dumb design of what's otherwise a pretty cool product.

Following Roman's advice, I created and sync'ed the sound using Audacity, then put the sound in as the background "soundtrack" for the demo. But I don't like this solution either, since the sound is not tied to any specific slide. If I fast-foward or rewind while the demo's playing, the sound is out-of-sync and you basically have to go back to the beginning of the demo.

What I'd like to do is just paste the sound in using some sort of mixer. But I don't want to pay for the full Flash tool just to do the soundtrack. Anybody know of any open-source Flash/sound mixing software?