Microsoft PDC 2010 : Video RSS Feeds

Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly.  Its always left to somebody to help us out.

PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application.  And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed.  And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual.

Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe.  Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here. 

If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format.

Active Player

If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RSS Feeds and instantly playback, take a look at Active Player.  Not only it help you subscribe to RSS Feeds, it also let you take notes, bookmark those videos or even create clips of those videos for sharing or review later.  Here is a snapshot of the Active Player playing a Video from PDC2010 feed.

Active Feeds : Create an RSS Feed of your Favorite Videos

I built a small Google App Engine app, called Active Feeds recently to create your own RSS Feed from videos from anywhere on the web and share with the world. I quickly built a set of RSS Feeds for Videos available at ASP.NET to demonstrate.  Next time, if you want to create an RSS Feed with your favorite Videos, check it out. The application needs lots of work to make it more user friendly but as of now is fully functional to use.

Wired : The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet

Chris Anderson and Wired offer yet another riveting conclusion (sounds like a prediction for some of us) that the Web as we know is dead as we are getting more and more connected on the internet with apps and devices.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

-- The Web Is Dead. Long Live Internet, Wired

I agree 100%, as it is just a fact for how I consume content on the internet. Almost (99%) everything I do on the internet is done through a custom application (mostly on iPhone and iPad) rather on the web.

Another reason, we want to go with custom apps instead of web applications is that we could probably avoid lots of distraction on the web. Particularly for students, it would matter the most to stay focused and learn better. So this has been primary motivation behind the Active Learning suite.

Active Player lets you enjoy and learn from your favorite videos and podcasts without ever visiting a single web page. If a website doesn’t offer an RSS Feed, you can create your own RSS Feed of any content available on the internet with Active Feeds and help the rest of the world updated without ever visiting the web.

Its not at all a surprise!

For me, this is not a surprise. Back in 2004-2005 the whole world was drumming about going to Web for everything and predicting that apps on desktops will be dead pretty soon (smart phones are still a luxury at that time and apps on mobile devices are not yet born).  I didn’t believe that it would happen. Instead, I believed that if we want the best, then they better be desktop apps but be connected on the net.

What we need is a smart desktop application or a browser plugin or a desktop widget that is totally integrated with an online application, its data storage and an online interface.

It would be better to create the best of both worlds when user interaction need to be essentially rich and needs ability to work offline (as neither online nor offline desktop alone can not take advantage of the situation) and also need all of that an online application offers.

--Why desktop apps will stay, 9/26/2006

With iPhone released in 2007 and App Store in 2008, apps created a thriving eco-system of its own and time for apps has just arrived, again.

And that is what happened. Rather than moving everything to the web to take advantage of the internet, we are in fact bringing everything on the internet to devices. 

When Netflix started offering streaming videos online, we may have watched them on our desktops or laptops. But now more and more people are watching those movies right on their TV sets and more recently started watching on their iPads. In fact, Netflix’s streaming service got lot more popular with their iPad application.

So, welcome back to apps. Rich, lively and intuitive. In most cases, they would be less distracting. And musical, of course. (If you haven’t realized, on the web, there are no sound effects). Be it a desktop app or an app on your Mobile phone or on a special device.

Lifecycle of a Wireframe

Just watched Lifecycle of a Wireframe by Nick Finck on Active Player. Wonderful session.

Dive deep into the process used to create wireframes, a key deliverable for user experience designers. Hear about the principles that guide this process, how to create great wireframes (all the way down to the nitty-gritty page or screen level), and how to identify and deliver solutions that meet your clients' business goals and solve their problems. Walk away with a better understanding of what delivering awesome wireframes entails - from methodology, to process, to delivery - and how to do it yourself. If you're an information architect, interaction designer, visual designer, or regular old user experience-curious creature: this one's for you.

Source : Lifecycle of a Wireframe from MIX 2010 ( Feed ) via Active Player

While we can just start with a white paper and pencil to get started with wire-frames, We could also create great wireframes right in MS Power Point itself. You may download this  MS Power Point template for creating wonderful wireframes in Power Point.

Active Player Now Plays YouTube Videos

Go ahead and grab the latest version of the Active Player as the new version now plays YouTube videos too. You can add individual YouTube videos by the URL or you can subscribe to RSS Feeds that contain YouTube videos.

Adding a Single YouTube Video to your Collections

Let me quickly show you how simply you can add a YouTube video to your collections.

On the left side Toolbar,  click on (Web Icon). It will open up “Add a Media File From Internet” popup.

Once you enter the URL, it automatically picks up the type of Video as “Youtube Videos”. Fill in the rest details of the YouTube video and click on “Save”. The application will save the Video details and instantly start playing the video right within the Active Player itself.

The player will be automatically resized to fit the size of the window as you resize the Active Player.

Subscribing to YouTube RSS Feeds

Now let us see how quickly you can subscribe to RSS Feed with YouTube Videos. Go to http://www.youtube.com/rssls and grab an RSS feed you are interested in. You can pick up a variety of RSS Feeds like user feeds, featured videos, recently added, videos of a specific tag etc. I will pick up an RSS Feed of Youtube videos with “india” in tags.

Click on RSS Feed icon on the left side tool bar. It will open up the familiar “Add a Feed” form. In the form, fill in the RSS Feed URL and click on “Add”.

Active Player will grab the feed and display details of the feed. Update feed details as you like, add the feed to collections you want and click on “Save”. I have added to “My Favorites” and updated the title a bit.

Active Player will load the feed items to your collection. That’s all it takes. Now any time a new video is posted on Youtube with “india” in tags, you are ready to watch the video with a single click. Here we go, I am playing the India’s $35 laptop video right away.

Anytime, you would like to play the Youtube video on the original Youtube page, click on   to go to original Youtube page.

Hope, you will like this. If you haven’t grabbed Active Player, you can install the Player from here. Let us know what you think.

Active Learning : The Four Generations Of Active Player

It was so thrilling to see how Active Player went through 4 major iterations in the last 6 years, since I built the first draft version back in August of 2004. As far as I can remember, so far the application has been used by about 1400 users to learn from various videos and webcasts. I am quite excited to see how many more will find it useful, now that the application is open to all.

I would like to share, what motivated me to develop this kind of application in the first place in a separate post. Here is a rundown on the memory lane and various features (as far as I could recollect) included in each of those versions.

First Generation : August of 2004

• Built and runs on .NET 1.1
• Opens Media files that are stored locally on a computer or on the internet.
• Once the file is loaded, it will read any information about Chapters (markers) in the file and display in Media Chapters section.
• User can add his/her own bookmarks on the media file that will show up in the bottom half of the sidebar.
• Bookmarks are stored in an xml file, named after the media file name and stored in the same location. So when you open a media file, it automatically picks up the bookmarks file as well.
• Optionally, user can choose a specific bookmark file, like a centralized file with all bookmarks in one place to quickly move between different video files.
• To share, user just need to email the Bookmarks file to a friend/colleague.

Second Generation  April 2006

• Supports everything as in first generation.
• Re-organized the visual layout and built on .NET 2.0 with VS2005
• Side bar now has tabbed panels, with each tab occupy the sidebar space fully.
• Introduced Clips, where a portion of the video can be marked for replay later on.
• Also introduced facility to play “All Clips” together. Great for students, as it would help to quickly revisit all those important portions from different videos.
• No longer support one bookmark file for each media file, but forces a centralized and default bookmark file. So user never have to specify a bookmark file.
• User can open a different bookmark file if wants to. For instance, when a friend shares his/her bookmarks file, a user can open that bookmark file and access all those bookmarks and clips.

A web-based version of Active Player Feb, 2007

Created a web based Active Player for creating bookmarks and clips on MP3 files in Feb 2007 and presented it in Democamp Dallas in Feb, 2007. Later this application has been enhanced to support video files by embedding various video players in the browser.  This web application was discontinued later in the year due to little change of priorities.

Started working on a web based Active Player a couple of weeks back and will release some time in November, 2010.

Here is a snapshot of the MP3 Active Player from the democamp. You can see more pictures here.

Third Generation, May 2009

• Started using Click Once Deployment.
• The application has been redesigned for visual layout and built on .NET 3.5.
• Included support for RSS Feed subscriptions as well Subscription from custom Feeds from the Training classroom website (INSPIONS University).
• Storage has been upgraded from XML file to SQL Server Compact Edition. But the data structures are kept intact from XML file version for backward compatibility.
• Added concept of Collections, where Media files can be organized into groups/collections.
• Support downloading media files from RSS Subscriptions and files directly added.
• Separate tabs for Bookmarks and Clips.

Latest and the 4th Generation, July/Aug 2010

• Quite significant changes in the software architecture itself.
• Included support to embed Apple Quicktime along with Microsoft Windows Media Player, so abstracted the MediaPlayer code to generic interface and built a repository for media players to be selected based on file format.
• All feed fetching, syncing and downloading operations moved to separate background worker threads.
• Completely redesigned the database schema and internal data structures and now using Entity Models instead of typed datasets from earlier versions.
• Removed support for custom XML formats and streamlined all Collections to RSS Feed specification. So every thing will be now an RSS Feed/collection.
• Visual layout has been modified for much better cleaner and slim look and gives full space to the video being played.
• Tab bars have been split and pushed to the sides, keeping in view the wide screen monitors that are shorter but wider in nature.
• Bookmarks/Clips have been combined in to one tree view.
• Display Bookmarks/Clips of the current media file opened top in the view and rest of the files below.
• On minimizing or closing, application now just minimizes to the tray.
• Restricted to single instance of the application running at any point.
• Now need explicit but FREE Activation to keep track of some stats from each individual user as well as to build a community of users for better sharing and collaboration.
• Social aspects like pushing user updates and bookmarks/clips to social networking websites are coming soon.

So, here we are with the latest and 4th generation of the Application. Now that, the application is open to all, I hope many more people may find it useful for learning online.