[off-topic-ish] do you prefer LC-related content as books or video courses?

Andre Garzia andre at andregarzia.com
Fri Jul 10 06:14:37 EDT 2020


Folks,

Thanks a lot for your detailed responses. Since you have all been quite
awesome in giving me all these great replies and feedback, let me tell you,
in probably more details than you'd ever want, where I am coming from and
what I plan to do going forward.

Many here know that I have graduated from a film school. Doing videos feel
like going home for me and I believe in the potential of multimedia to be
an effective learning tool. Still, I have always been in love with books
and like many here I favour books over video any time. I was considering
doing more video related content because other people I know are having a
better return on video courses than on books. Of course this depends on the
community and here books appear to rule, which is good for me because I
enjoy writing books and that is the direction I want to shift my career to
anyway.

I have just completed a major JavaScript book for a famous publishing house
in the U.S. and am ready to go back to self-publishing and work on my own
titles on my own time. The book I made about LiveCode best practices and
code organisation was well received and even though I have issued some
updates, I haven't updated as often as I wanted to. The reason behind not
updating often is because of some of the worst aspects of capitalism:
updating the book didn't really add to the sales figures and I live in a
very expensive city (I live in London now). Every time I updated the book
there would be some extra sales, but not as many as to justify working on
it. The alternative would be to raise the prices so that each sale would be
more valuable to me but I'm against it because I think the price should
reflect the value of the object being sold. That book has been done without
an editor and in a hurry, I can't charge as much for it as I'd charge for a
book that involved more professionals and more care. I think the price for
that specific book is right.

So, going forward I think I am going to write more books but also shorter
books. There is a problem with trying to create comprehensive references or
bible-like books. They are harder to do and you sell them only once. Our
community is small, there is a limited amount of sales to be done inside
it. What I will do is create shorter books focused on a single topic and
sell them individually for a low price so that people can acquire them all
without actually having to worry. This way I can produce books faster
(which lowers the cost of producing them for me) and you get to have fresh
content, which is something that we all know a healthy ecosystem needs. I
might make some short videos, but mostly for engagement and highlighting
cool stuff. Video takes longer to produce and unfortunately my current
daily driver machine doesn't support any decent video editor.

As for using stacks as interactive learning material, that reminds me of
Director. I think it is a great idea. The problem is that I am writing
about other technologies as well and I can't build a pipeline and tools to
deliver stacks (even as standalones) to the other communities at the
moment. I might explore that in the future but for now doing ebooks is the
best way forward. It is easy, I know how to do it, and I can focus on doing
content instead of building new tools.

For those that haven't been exposed to my best practices book, you can find
it at:

http://andregarzia.com/books/livecode-advanced-application-architecture.html

I have also created a Ko-fi. This is a website like Patreon that helps
connect audiences with creators by allowing people to donate money as a one
time donation or as a recurring donation depending on how much they want to
support the creator. My plan is to engage with those supporting me on
ko-fi, and let them see advanced copies of the books, help decide what the
next topics to tackle and so on. Another thing I like about ko-fi is that
they style the whole process as "buy me a coffee", so you're basically
sending creator small donations so they can afford caffeine. Something I
really need to write books. I will price the books low, so if you think
about sending more money or making this more sustainable, my Ko-fi is at:

https://ko-fi.com/andregarzia

>From what I have been reading on the list, I think there is a need for a
small book on "launchers" or as we used to call them "splash stacks". They
are a fantastic way to deploy tools to the enterprise and clients, they
unite the easy deployability of the web with the powerful feature set of
Desktop apps. More seasoned LC developers, especially those that worked as
ISV before the App Store, are probably familiar with them but this is
probably a new subject to many of the people who came to LC more recently.
I think this is will be the first new small book. I'm thinking about 45
pages. I hope you'll like it.

Best
A


On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 at 20:20, William Prothero via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> FYI, I’ve found some of the MovAvi <https://www.movavi.com/mac.html> apps
> to be good and very inexpensive. That said, I’m not doing a lot of video
> editing these days, but found the video editing app to be easier to use
> than iMovie. I used Final Cut Pro, but didn’t renew when Apple went to
> 64bit only.
>
> Best,
> Bill
>
> William A. Prothero
> https://earthlearningsolutions.org
>
> > On Jul 8, 2020, at 11:13 AM, Stephen Barncard via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> >
> > I prefer video, but I feel demonstrations should have some production
> value
> > other that just a screen share.
> > Indicators, motion graphics, etc and not just a guy and his desktop.  And
> > EDITING!!!
> > I'm a Final Cut Pro video guy these days and have ALL the groovy plugins
> > so I'm not being fair I guess.
> >
> > iMovie is far better these days that it used to be, but strangely very
> > difficult to upgrade an iMovie package to Final Cut, once one is there.
> > Roadblocks everywhere. Typical Apple %$#%#%#$%#$.
> >
> > sqb
> > --
> > Stephen Barncard - Sebastopol Ca. USA -
> > mixstream.org
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 10:36 AM Jim Lambert via use-livecode <
> > use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi André,
> >>
> >> I previously always favored printed books.
> >>
> >> But now I prefer digital materials that are a combination of text (with
> >> copiable code!), interactive elements, and supplementary video.
> >> As Richard pointed out LC itself provides "the many learning benefits of
> >> direct engagement with interactive media.”
> >>
> >> IMO, Video is most appropriate when used to convey visual, spatial and
> >> temporal examples. It’s can also provide a bit of a human touch to the
> >> instruction, even though it’s utterly mechanical.
> >>
> >> So, yeah, I like a combo.
> >>
> >> Hope this helps!
> >>
> >> Jim Lambert
> >>
> >>
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-- 
http://www.andregarzia.com



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