Progress Update - Sunday, September 20, 2015
Hereās a funny story. Well, it was funny to me. I suppose it is a bit like a mad scientist to be laughing alone in my office. HA!
I was researching the changes in version 1.6 of Hype. I was trying to figure out the right words for the start of the āMultiple Timelinesā section. I realized that my idea wouldnāt work. However, I noticed something in one of the Hype videos ā the Capo and the Timeline Cursor can be moved together.
Since people seem to want tremendous detail in this book, I decided to add that information to the book. Yet, I felt that it wasnāt enough to simply describe the feature with pictures and text alone. It needed motion. Unfortunately, it seems that animated GIFs donāt work in iBooks, so I decided to add a video.
OK, hereās the funny part. It was an unusual amount of work for a small 12 second video ā with no audio.
I use an old Mac Mini (Early 2009 model) as my main computer. I upgraded it with an SSD and 8GB of RAM, so I feel that itās fine. The problem is that I donāt have a retina display monitor. To compensate for this, I use the āDuetā app and an iPad Air 2. Thatās how Iāve been creating the screen shots. This process seems to be working. But when I tried to create a screen capture video using this setup, it didnāt work. The video was just a mouse cursor and a black background.
I created the video with my main monitor ā a 1280 x 1024 display. I donāt need the full display. Iām just focusing on the timeline. The video was OK, but it wasnāt retina quality. Iām not sure if anyone would care, but I felt that the video should be retina quality too. I felt bad. So, I tried another technique.
I have a DVI to HDMI cable. I hooked it up to my HDTV. Using a command in terminal, HiDPI can be activated on old Macs.
My 1080p TV was converted to a 960 x 540 HiDPI display. I recreated the video using this setup and it worked. That was a lot of work for a 12 second video.
Itās been challenging to deliver high-quality images, while working with older hardware and keeping the file size down. Storage space is expensive on iOS devices. I donāt want to ship a 1GB+ book. Iām happy with the quality of the images. And now, thereās a small (but Retina quality) video too.