Advice on making tutorials

I would be grateful for advice on how to make tutorials about RISC OS. Yes, I know, this is a hopelessly vague question, but even some generalities would be helpful. I am limited by the equipment I have: no smart phone or experience of using one. No webcam except in a Pinebook (thanks to RComp), and the Linux installed on it is Manjaro which may be lacking the necessary software packages. I have a USB microphone, but on the whole I think legible captions are a better bet than my voice. So demonstrations need to be done by screen capture. I can use VNC to show the RISC OS desktop on an Rpi with Raspberry Pi OS, but I am not sure how to do the captioning or the screen capture. So what hardware, what software, what techniques do others use? Hitherto I have just made static webpages, but these may be insufficiently appealing nowadays.

OBS Studio is good for screen recording on Mac/Windows/Linux. I used it to record this video – in my case I was recording a RPCEmu window, but the same principle should apply. You can set it to record the whole screen or just a window, so you could point it at the VNC window to capture the RISC OS desktop.

I’ve never used it on a Raspberry Pi so don’t know if it would work. But there are versions available for ArchLinux/Manjaro and Debian (which RasPi OS is based on). Instructions at https://obsproject.com/wiki/unofficial-linux-builds

Also there is the “RISC OS Community on GitHub” channel on YouTube which has some RISC OS tutorial videos, it may be a good idea to enquire with them about their setup. https://www.youtube.com/@RiscosCommunityOnGithub/

Thanks. It occurred to me that using sticky notes with Pinboard 2 might be a convenient way of incorporating captions, but unfortunately there does not seem to be a convenient way of setting margins in them – yet. Text jammed up against the top and left borders is inelegant.

Hmmm… I deplore the number of interesting tutorials that are now presented as videos. That sort of thing may be useful for showing the correct technique for CPR or threading a bobbin, but for computer stuff? A screenful of code is not interesting, watching the piston type it in is not interesting, and it’s not possible to copy-paste from a video. I feel stuff like that should be kept as a nicely detailed document that one can work through at their own pace.

But, then, I’m nearly 50 which makes me (almost) officially “an old git”. Can’t be having this newfangled rubbish with moving pictures in it!

Well I am 84 and definitely an old git. I share Rick’s sentiments here. There is a lot to be said for plain ASCII text. You cannot retrieve the eggs once you have baked the cake. The secretaries at the university were used only to MS Windows and had difficulty with the notion that the purposes of archiving and the purposes of presentation were antithetical.

Very much the modern way. “Monkey see, monkey do” without actually understanding.

At work (still there¹ 3 days a week) I’m praised and criticised for telling people how to find/figure out the answer(s) rather than simply giving the answer(s).
I’ve always felt the people should understand rather than blindly repeat. Theoretically it reduces the number of silly trivial requests.

¹ Retire & Return – collect the pension and amuse yourself a few days a week while getting paid.

The tools I use in addition to the above are Linux-based LibreOffice and KdenLive. Then there is Davinci Resolve by Black Magic design which I’ve used but not fully road tested. On the hardware side, I have my Cadillac (Linux, Windows PC) and a 4K USB 3 HDMI output capture dongle, connected to my RPi.

@Gavin- your web-based and disc-based tutorials are very good.

Maybe the word tutorial is too vague. We RISC OS users would like to encourage others to use RISC OS, and maybe even program using it. For the complete newcomer I think there is some virtue in seeing how the desktop and filer are used and videos can be OK for that. But for programming, I agree that screenfulls of code are not useful. So how does one learn to code? One possible answer is that one copies other people’s code and plays with it – altering the source in little bits, rebuilding and seeing if it still works. This is only going to work for well written and well documented code, and it presumes a knowledge of how to get from source to executable. Understanding the tools may be a bigger barrier than writing a program. Writing the code and using the tools to build it are activities envelopped in a fog of terminology, sometimes relics from the stone age of computing.

@Andrew- thanks for the encouragement.

We RISC OS users would like to encourage others to use RISC OS, and maybe even program using it.

IMHO that would make a great mission statement.

The part of the equation the meetups have sought to address is not how to program per se in a particular language, but to focus on the differences and/or the similarities of RISC OS to other platforms.

In other words. How do I create a program that outputs a file, that focuses on what’s unique about doing that on RISC OS? In the languages available for RISC OS. And that’s just one of the many examples already talked about that include multi-tasking, socket programming, Make files, fonts, using the toolbox and displaying sprites.

This is only going to work for well written and well documented code, and it presumes a knowledge of how to get from source to executable.

True, and that has been our aim, and hopefully captured by the videos that have been created, and supporting documentation where it’s needed.

Understanding the tools may be a bigger barrier than writing a program. Writing the code and using the tools to build it are activities envelopped in a fog of terminology, sometimes relics from the stone age of computing.

True. (deep breath- as I may have misinterpreted what I’ve read) What perhaps, isn’t going to help with fixing this is NDAs, but the bounty goal of updated PRMs is one of merit.

Working with others, being open, in a mutually beneficial way should be the primary focus, as I hope comes across with the things I do. Of course, tensions will understandably exist as we’re human.

I believe that a lot of the answers will come from those new to RISC OS, and the experienced members of our community.

@Gavin – you’re welcome, and thank you for them.

We RISC OS users would like to encourage others to use RISC OS, and maybe even program using it.

If you used to program back in the late 80s and early 90s, and not done anything since, then you’ll be able to pick up right where you left off. The more exposure you’ve had of more modern programming languages, tools, IDEs and APIs, the more challenging you will find working with RISC OS. Luckily there are still quite a few people that enjoy a challenge.

there is some virtue in seeing how the desktop and filer are used

Yes. Once upon a time RISC OS was “just another system”, and a fairly advanced one at that.
Unfortunately for us, time has moved on and it seems everywhere else has mostly standardised on a set of metaphors. Not necessarily good ones, bit whatever.
So a necessary part of such a tutorial should talk about how RISC OS is different.

Main points off the top of my head:

• Generally, starting an application does not cause a window to appear (though some applications do do this).
• Closing the window does not quit the app.
• All menus are context sensitive and are called up using the middle mouse button. We don’t waste screen space with always visible menus, and/or put menus in weird places like along the top of the screen.
• The filer… this would be a tutorial in itself!

So how does one learn to code?

Question one: What does one want to actually do?
Question two: In what language?

While BASIC is useful and fairly flexible, plus built in, there are other options that may be more suitable.

Understanding the tools may be a bigger barrier than writing a program.

Not necessarily. If somebody wants to program in C on RISC OS, assume they are already familiar with C.
Don’t waste time trying to teach it, it’s complicated and pointers are a fascination all their own. SAMS has a teach yourself in 21 days book that runs to hundreds and hundreds of pages (it’s thicker than mom’s bible).
What to talk about would be the RISC OS specific parts. How the toolchain works, the various libraries, etc.
How the fact that our devtools are essentially non interactive and the debugger leaves so much to be desired it’s really a last ditch option. 😡

So how does one learn to code?

Back to this. For me, it’s always been about scratching a personal itch. I don’t code for money, I code because I want to make something do something. My MIDI module was basically “can I plug my keyboard into RISC OS?”. My ESP32Cam projects are, well, “LapseCam” speaks for itself. ;)

One possible answer is that one copies other people’s code and plays with it

That’s how I learned. Stuff in Acorn User, whether on disc or as a type-in. I looked to see how it does what it does, then randomly fiddled to see what sort of effects the fiddling had.

This is only going to work for well written and well documented code,

Different people have different ideas on what that means. ;)

Hell, wars are raging in the C-like-language world about where to put the braces, never mind anything else.

and it presumes a knowledge of how to get from source to executable.

That’s why BASIC was good BITD. No complications, and the concepts that apply to BASIC pretty much apply to C (or PHP, Lua, etc etc). There will be systematic differences, but loops and pointers are the same even if the way of writing them differs.

this is NDAs

I think this depends upon what your anticipated end goal is.
For me, the RISC OS NDAs are only an annoyance because Resolver is broken, ShareFS has some interesting bugs, and I’d really like to teach ObjAsm to be a little smarter (instead of losing its marbles over something like PUSH when PUSH is a macro (definition not faulted) and not actually supported in the current configuration (so…)).

That being said, I have otherwise not run into NDA impediments. Sure, I’ve put my name to a couple, but that’s because it’s for software still being sold, which is understandable. People around here don’t publish the source of software they’re selling as what’s to sell when people can build their own?

For me, I think it’ll come back to examples of practical projects. A webradio. A way to pull images from NOAA to make an animation. A weather logging system (bonus points if it can learn from its log in order to make predictions).
Don’t start with the What, or the How. Start with the Why.

On other operating systems, there WERE IDEs not that dissimilar to modern ones, even back in the late 1980s: Turbo Pascal 4 probably being the first. As well as DOS, there were quite a few for the Amiga (many by a British company, HiSoft). By the early 1990s Delphi had code completion; by the mid-1990s so did Visual Basic (and Visual C++, though it didn’t work very well there).

In many ways, the tools were easiest to use before the advent of .NET; since then the APIs have got more complex and that’s made aspects of the languages more complex too. And the GUI designers are much harder to use than they used to be. Though the latest trend is to use declarative code, as seen in SwiftUI and Flutter.

The biggest change on most other platforms is that the development tools are free—or at least there is a community edition with virtually the full functionality of the pro version, because Microsoft and Apple want people to develop software for their platforms.

@ Robert

Also there is the “RISC OS Community on GitHub” channel on YouTube which has some RISC OS tutorial videos, it may be a good idea to enquire with them about their setup. https://www.youtube.com/@RiscosCommunityOnGithub/

Thanks for the mentioning. Gavin is actually part of the ROCOG (RISC OS Community on GitHub), and has commented on a few of the video tasks Github’s issues that we regularly publish for some of the video tasks.

There isn’t anything magic behind making a video for this initiative, all it’s needed is:

1) Read the instructions for each video on the corresponded GitHub’s issue (we discuss them, so if one has problems, we are always happy to help)
2) Set your RISC OS video resolution to 720p and record it with any decent quality video capture device at 1080p
3) If one can’t record a full 10 (max 15 minutes) video in a single session, they can record it in pieces (I’ll recombine the pieces together in a single video). If this is the favorite choice, remember to leave space at the beginning and end of a video segment, to make my life easier when editing your video.
4) No need to record your face, literally users have requested no face in the videos, so that makes things much easier for you and for me (to resync the audio for instance)
5) Send me your work in .mov format or any of the already published list of formats I can edit and I’ll create a video with all the effects, heads/tails, audio corrections and every other bits you guys have seen so far.

If one doesn’t have a video capturing device, you can use RPCEmu running on your Linux, Windows, macOS system and just record RCPEmu screen. Write your scripts so that you can have enough time within the video and then record your audio separately, I’ll combine the audio for you, if that’s an issue.

All programming languages are welcome and we also support ALL RISC OS versions. Most videos are made using RISC OS 5 just for convenience, but code runs on all RISC OS releases down to release 3. So also the retro community is enjoying our videos.

Hope this helps,

@ Gavin

Dear Gavin, if you do not wish to send me your work (that is totally fine btw), then you’ll need a bit more than just capture your screen. The list of activities is quite long, and if you need, send me an email and I’ll happily explain all you need from pre-production, production to post production.

If instead, you wish to just have some fun making some videos about RISC OS, then just start with recording your screen and see where it brings you and if you like the result of it compared to whatever is your reference.

One recommendation I have is (which is a bit of a weird one tbh): don’t listen to people that tell you what to do, they mean well, however, one of the problems with making video tutorials is that you need to be consistent and frequest with your work and only if you are enjoying what you’re doing, you can ensure all of that.

Sure, to capture “new” users attentions the “bar” is quite high at the moment, there are literaly milions of video-tutorials out there and for literaly everything, so people expect certain standards and formats, but that is something you can quickly learn by watching tutorials made by other people that you think are good and that you like.

people expect certain standards

Unfortunately, what seems like a guy and his friends messing around actually, these days, has a production team behind it.

Example? The infamous Mr. Beast making fun of random short videos with some amateurish special effects added on top.
Until you realise there are a lot of other really subtle effects in there, and some videos carry alternate audio tracks, the content dubbed in various other languages.

Or Tom Scott. He’s gone from a guy who explained how YouTube URLs work to a camera in one take (including quoting a ridiculously long number) to travelling the world, multiple camera angles, subtitles for non-English bits, and gratuitous drone shots just because they look great.

Sure, a better quality of video is more engaging than something “filmed with a potato”, but better tends to mean time and expense. If there’s no recompense, be careful how much you are willing to put into each video. Those people I mentioned above? Tom sending garlic bread to the edge of space? 61M views. With earnings from YouTube given on various third party websites as $16K-22K per month (massive pinch of salt required), there’s definitely the ability to fund interesting content and the production behind it.

The rest of us? Well, dunno about you but my crappy videos with no production values (something I mock regularly ☺) don’t yet qualify me to even think about monetising. So I edit them and add captions using an app on my phone. The process of making a video already takes way too much time. I’d love to be able to subtitle, but all the software I’ve found so far has been clumsy and tedious.

and formats

Formats aren’t relevant these days. If it uploads to YouTube…

I notice you requested .mov. I’ve not seen or used that in years. Are you using Apple?

Everything I do these days is H.264 or H.265 with AAC audio in an .mp4 wrapper.

but that is something you can quickly learn

Most important thing – write a script.
Second most important thing – rehearse it (to ensure no tongue twisters) and verify yurelucushuniscleauh. Exactly, don’t run words together (something I’m guilty of!).

One of the reasons I don’t tend to watch the various show “talks” is that it’s great that the RISC OS world has advanced to digital video. What it needs next is a teleprompter, uh, because, uh, when, um, people are um coming up um err with stuff um from the top of um their head um there’s a lot of um extra um words that um are extremely um distracting.

I won’t embarrass anybody, I’ll just say that a talk I watched a couple of years ago, I ended up counting the "um"s. No idea what the talk was actually about, my entire concentration was on the word “um”.

So…write a script. Know exactly word for word what you’re going to say before you say it.

@Paolo. I am having a spot of trouble with Jeffrey Lee’s vncserver module (v. 0.22, 05 April 2021) for RISC OS. When it is running, various keyboard and mouse actions appear not to work (RO 5.28 on Rpi4B). I guess I should have pointed this out to him personally, to check whether it is my fault or a feature, rather than blurting it out here. Anyway, I shall continue experimenting.

I take your point about consistency. My desktop, and StrongED basemode, are not standard, which could be a point of confusion for an audience. I have always hated desktop themes with slanted directory icons, for example. I suppose they were a misguided attempt at perspective, but they give me a pain in the neck.

I should mention that I fired up LibreOffice Impress, to see if I could use it. I soon found myself doing things I had not intended and did not know how to reverse. So I fled. It is another all-singing, all-dancing, powerful application that presents the user with the cockpit of a jumbo-jet. A ton of programming expertise and only a teaspoon of user-interface savvy to leverage it. Which is the sadder, my incompetence or the LibreOffice designer’s? RISC OS can spoil you for user-interfaces.

Thanks for your encouragement and hard work.

@Rick. Elocution, elocution, elocution. They don’t teach it anymore, do they? It might be thought too posh, like.
You are absolutely right. A script and practice are essential.

@ Rick

Formats aren’t relevant these days. If it uploads to YouTube…

Hmm, I guess my English was confusing there. What I meant with “formats”, wasn’t video-formats, it was more like show-formats, in other words:

1) Pre-amble at the beginning of a video to describe what is going to be shown, so, if one is not interested, they can jump out quickly
2) Video divided into chapters easy to access with a click
3) Chapters “fused” together through nice transitions
4) The code for the video available on GitHub (yes, I know you hate this, but it’s the de facto standard for like 99% of the coding video tutorials these days, sorry!)
5) The code repository designed to be ready to build code and not just a random set of files and a “good luck with that!” :)
6) Captions to explain more complex concepts, diagrams and slides where needed
7) Links in the video description to material to have more details and support or to download the required tools etc.
8) Total length of the video between 5 to max 15 minutes
9) Subtitles

Unfortunately, what seems like a guy and his friends messing around actually, these days, has a production team behind it.

This is very true, and that is part of the “issue”, competition for views over so many years have created incredibly high standards.

The rest of us? Well, dunno about you but my crappy videos with no production values (something I mock regularly ☺) don’t yet qualify me to even think about monetising.

We don’t have monetisation goals in mind TBH. Also, quite a few users have expressly requested to avoid having advertisements, and they have ad blockers in place anyway. If there will be a need for funding, we’ll probably either enable a sponsorship button on GitHub (so people could sponsor whatever activity they wish to push) or some other forms. But luckily, for now, no one involved needs extra money.

In terms of views, we are actually doing extremely well, both me and Sprow were not expecting such results, we have passed more than 1500 views already and in few months, while this may look small compared to millions of views of the entertainment channels, let’s remember that the ROCOG channel is a) only about RISC OS and b) mostly about coding on RISC OS (I mean it can’t get more nice than this!)

@ Gavin

@Paolo. I am having a spot of trouble with Jeffrey Lee’s vncserver module (v. 0.22, 05 April 2021) for RISC OS.

I’d ask for help to Jeffrey, he is always super nice and helpful.

In general, I’d not recommend to use VNC to record RISC OS, unless you’ve managed to have a very smooth and clean connection, because, one of the issues with all the presentations that use VNC is that they make RISC OS look slow, not sure that would be a good start to capture “new” users attention TBH (but I could be wrong on this).

Thanks for your encouragement and hard work.

You are welcome and it’s always good to see more things happening for RISC OS, so looking forward to your videos :)

I have just updated the RiscLua notes section on my webpages to include stuff on metatables. By way of example, how to make tables with case-insensitive keys.
Click here .

I have just updated the RiscLua notes section on my webpages to include stuff on metatables.

Nice job! Thanks a lot :)

I use this to record my videos with a jack mircrophone.

It plugs into the hdml socket of the moniter and the other end to my hdmi switch which is connected to my ARMX6 and Fortress,

I have a similar device to Kevin: an AVerMedia Game Capture HD II. It contains a hard disc (optionally also a USB memory) which can capture HDMI video that is coming out of a (RISC OS) computer on its way to one’s HDMI display. Captured video can then be mildly edited on the device, and exported for further use. Its recording can include sound/commentary, but subtitles would have to be added under another OS: not too difficult I believe.

Bernard your one looks better than my one.

Bernard your one looks better than my one

[raises one eyebrow questioningly]

Bernard your one looks better than my one.

Well, it’s no longer supported by AVerMedia and, at least when used on my Pi 400, it seems to inhibit the rebooting of RISC OS. I suppose it’s possible that some HDMI settings (or lack of) in config.txt interfere, but it’s hard to experiment.

I have sent Gavin (OP) a sample 90-second clip of desktop use, and now need advice on how to add captions or subtitles.