New blog post – A new chapter in VideoScribe development

  • Our new lead developer Pete has blogged about how development is changing at Sparkol. I know some of you will be interested.


    Read A new chapter in the development of VideoScribe


    Feel free to add your comments and ideas below.

  • Great to hear you will be implementing the Agile development process, it works well!

    Unless I missed some massive changes to Videoscribe recently then the top two items on my wish list are:

    1. Improved timeline to allow editing visuals to a voice-over (or music): you need to have a better timeline where you can see the audio waveform and move the graphical elements within the timeline to sync to the sound.
    2. Ability to Disable graphics so you can see and adjust elements  underneath the 'top layer'.
    Thanks
    Adrian
  • Hi LINC,
     Good news! In the current version of videoscribe, the eyeball icon by each thumbnail in the timeline in the current version will hide/unhide it's respective element on the canvas. The eyeball in the lower right corner will unhide all hidden elements.

    -Mike (videoscribe user)

     

  • Hello Adrian


    Thanks for your support. Our aim is to continuously improve VideoScribe to empower everyone to produce more impactive and engaging scribes easily. 


    Improvements to the timeline have been discussed along the lines you've mentioned, but need to be weighed against the potential benefits from improvements and new features in other areas.


    We appreciate feedback like yours, as it helps guide us deciding where to focus our development time.


    Thanks

    Peter

  • Peter,


    Welcome. I hope you'll take this as positive feedback.


    Sparkol is plagued by all of the hallmarks of a broken or non-existent development process. The examples have been thoroughly documented in this forum, but among the highlights are: 

    • A broken timeline that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't
    • Flagrantly ignoring Mac interface guidelines
    • A bizarre Save/Save As process that ignores 30 years of Windows/Mac precedent
    • Loss of features with version 2.X, such as frame rates, etc.
    The Agile process that you plan to instill sounds like a great idea. But you really need to stop creating new features for a while, and go back and fix these long-standing problems.

  • Hello Dave


    I appreciate your feedback. The blog post I made was a very public statement about the way things have been and how they’re changing.


    Each release of VideoScribe will contain a mix of new features along with bug fixes and refinements to existing. The exact mix of these depends on the priority of each individual piece of work.


    Ultimately we’ll be making these decisions based on feedback, along with our vision for VideoScribe. I hope that you’ll continue to help guide us as we move forwards.


    Thanks
    Peter

  • Peter,


    Let me put it this way. This week I renewed my subscription to VideoScribe Pro to complete a client project. Because of the well-documented and long-standing bugs in version 2.x, and the inability to set frame rate, I am using version 1.3, which was released in July 2013. I think the fact that Sparkol must keep 1.3 available for download should tell you everything you need to know about the importance of bug fixes over new development. 


    Here's a challenge to Peter Bridger: Sparkol has been making empty promises for a long time about fixing bugs and quality improvement. Do you have the guts to delay the release of version 2.1 until it is of high enough quality to remove version 1.3 from the download page?

  • Hello Dave


    I’m pleased to say that the frame rate is adjustable in the upcoming 2.1 release of VideoScribe, which was made available as a public beta on November 4th 2014. Since then we’re been making use of feedback and will be releasing an updated build soon.


    We've also fixed several long standing timeline and Mac specific issues in 2.1.


    If you would like to be part of the beta process, more information is available at http://www.sparkol.com/blog/videoscribe-2-1-beta-is-here/


    Once we’re confident in the quality of 2.1, it will be made available for general release.


    Thanks

    Peter

  • Here are a couple of items I would eventually like to see added to the feature set.

    If they've already been listed somewhere else, I apologize.


    1.  Some numeric positional aids.  Sometimes just dragging and dropping isn't enough.

    I construct everything I need in Illustrator in a master file, but when I import an item into Videoscribe, it's relative scale and position to the previous object I imported is lost.  I solve this by having an invisible bounding box on every item imported, but that seems awkward.  An option to keep it's initial positioning data, if that even exists, would be nice.

    2.  A feature to have the hand move from end of scene to start of next scene would be fantastic, and/or at least moving off screen when finished with a scene.  Having the hand pop off loses some of the elegance the rest of the drawing has.

    3.  More stability...we have frequent lock ups, and otherwise odd behavior.  We put up with it because it really is a nice product...just needs fine tuned :)


    Thanks.

    Mike

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