@GSoC2016students, as you work to prepare your development workstations for your upcoming projects, you may be wondering about how to share your work with your mentor(s) and colleagues in the OpenMRS Community. When you’re working in the same place with someone, this is as easy as asking someone to come over and look at your desktop. However, in open source projects, we work across continents and across time zones, so this isn’t possible.
When you want to demonstrate something you’ve made, or an issue with which you’re struggling, the best way to do so is usually a screencast. For longer sessions, you’ll want to create a video with audio narration and upload it to a host such as YouTube. (Tip: You can embed videos inline with your posts on OpenMRS Talk!)
I bought ScreenFlow and have found it handy for both simple and more complicated needs, but if that’s too expensive, here’s a decent review of screen recording apps for Mac.
Also as a heads up, we can ask students to get a reliable and fast internet connection atleast for the length of the program. It would solve a lot of problems, especially downloading new required software, modules etc on the fly, uploading stuff and just everything in general. The money isn’t even an issue now
I have two scripts (one for recording a region of my screen, one for the whole window), this assumes Linux by the way. Both use byzanz-record. I learned about this from the spacemacs community when I needed to demonstrate a bug or show off a new feature – great emacs starter kit (yes, shameless plug) – I’d still argue you’re better off using IntelliJ IDEA, the java support uses eclipse in a headless state, so you get all the refactoring toolings
This will generate an animated gif. Here’s an example I used to illustrate a recent bug in ID Dashboard:
GIF’s can be good for very short demonstration of a bug or small interaction, but for anything longer than a few seconds or needing audio, you will want to use video.
