When Heathenx and I started this site, we really just wanted a place to showcase our Inkscape screencasts. I think we’ve been fairly successful in illustrating some creative ways of using Inkscape. We’ve had quite a few people tell us that the videos on our site have been really inspiring to them. And this makes us happy. Very happy. But I think there are also quite a few people out there who would like to do this sort of stuff with Inkscape but need a little help along the way in learning some of the basics. Sitting through a 30 minute screencast to try and learn those basics can be daunting. I think we’ve now got a little something to help those people out. We call them Microsodes.

You’ll now find a link along the top navigation bar on our site that points to our Microsodes page. On that page you’ll find several short screencasts (7 at this point, with more to come). Aside from maybe the first one, they appear in no specific order really. You can think of them as a sort of Inkscape FAQ list. These are answers to things that people who are new to Inkscape tend to find themselves asking.

Over the past months, Heathenx and I have been asked by several different people to explain or describe some specific procedure in Inkscape, and being screencasters, if the answer can’t be given in a few sentences, we find it rather more useful to create a short screencast describing them. The microsodes page will serve as a storehouse for those types of things as well.

So if you run across someone just starting out with Inkscape who’s looking for some help, feel free to point them to the Microsodes page. Or if you’re like me, and use a piece of software for years before stumbling upon some basic function that could have shaved hours off your work, you might find them useful as well.

We decided that we would provide these at a slightly smaller (but perfectly readable) 800×600 size and in Flash-only format. We chose this because Flash is pretty much ubiquitous and the last thing an Inkscape newbie needs is to futz around with video codecs and formats.

Kudos to Heathenx for getting them to show up in a very slick little flash popup too.

Note to our faithful subscribers, this is NOT a new direction for our screencasts, we still see the value (and fun) in screencasting longer and more (arguably) artistic or practical projects. Our regular screencasts will continue as normal. We just wanted to do something to help those people just getting started with Inkscape too.

Cheers, and Happy Inkscaping!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.