It has been a little over 8 months since the Palm Pre was released to the public, and its just this week that Palm has finally released a Video Recorder as part of the operating system upgrade for webOS 1.4.

My initial tests with the video recorder generated video in .mpg4 that looks pretty good on the phone itself, a 60 second video takes up just under 40 megabytes of space on the phones memory.

It comes setup with a YouTube and Facebook video uploader, but neither one of them worked the first 3 days, I used the video recorder. 

But finally today, I was able to upload one of those videos successfully to YouTube so maybe the bugs are getting chased out of the new system.

So from my perspective, I am a mobile video blogger once again! I haven’t had this capability on a smart phone in almost 2 years since my Treo 700P on Verizon died and was replaced under warranty for the 5th time and I switched to a non-smart phone so I could actually make and receive phone calls.

You can also email videos with the Palm Pre but for some reason you are capped at sending videos of no more than 17 seconds (about 10 megabytes), which is very different from the Treo, which allowed you to send and attachment as large as the receiving email system would allow.

The webOS 1.4 update has a few other changes.  The buttons look ‘cooler’ and when you launch any given application, a slightly smaller than full screen image of the application shows up immediately on the screen as if your Pre is doing something, but unfortunately, the actual launch of almost all applications from the point of pushing the button to the point of actually being able to do something with the application seems to be a couple seconds slower.  (Score one for Form over Function!)

All in all, I’m still very happy with my Palm Pre.  Glad Palm finally decided to meet the minimum market standards for a smart phone by adding video.  I could never understand why Palm followed in Apple’s moronic foot steps and decided not to include video on the Pre (a year after Apple made the same mistake).  Regardless, I’m glad video recording is here now, and from my perspective the Palm Pre is now a fully functional smart phone.

Finally!  Palm is finally (almost) going to turn on the video recording and editing capability in Palm Pre’s.  The Pre has been out for a year and they expect to send this out in an over the air update in February.  Sure you might ask why the delay until February.  Well ask away, it was silly to wait this long, no point in expecting rationality at this late stage. 

Palm will be pushing out and over-the-air update to all webOS devices (Pre and Pixi) that will enable video recording and editing without the need to purchase additional hardware. This is a feature that has been sorely lacking on webOS.

The recording feature works nearly identically to that of the iPhone’s on-device video editing tool. It lets users crop a video and reduce the size of the clip. Users can then upload to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace with a single tap. Uploads will occur the background. Once uploaded, webOS will alert the user and give then the opportunity to send SMS links or MMS messages to the video to their friends.

The update will be free and will be available in February.

Informationweek

Earlier today, I was testing out some video creation concepts for developing Dragon Naturally Speaking Tutorials and Demos.

I created a video and uploaded it to several video serving sites and was most impressed with the video quality of HowCast.com a video sharing service that specializes in How to videos.

For a couple years now I have been using the free service at Revver, and contemplating paying for bandwidth on Screencast.com, but today when I saw the quality of the video at Howcast, I was definitely impressed and may switch from Revver to Howcast when I’m working on free hosting.

HowCast Version

Revver Version

This video is a little unfocused, as I had some difficulty getting my basic camera to focus well on both myself and the flat panel screen in less than ideal lighting conditions that would at least keep a teen on Differin happy.

TEXT FROM THE VIDEO – - I can type relatively quickly compared to many People. But I can speak much much faster than I can type.
I can type just as fast as I can speak when I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I do have to insert punctuation at times, and that doesn’t make for good conversation, but it does make for exceptionally fast typing on my computer.

Currently I’m using the old version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9 preferred. But today it’s August 7, 2008 and nuance the makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking have released Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10 preferred. The new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking will not only enable me to type faster than I could type in Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9, which you are witnessing as I created this video, but it will also display the words faster on the screen so by financial he began to compose my writing while a speak and so just transcribing the words that I have spoken. This will give me immediate feedback as to what I just said in enable me to prepare to compose speak and write my next words.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking so I can begin to compose with my voice as opposed to transcribing with my voice.

Regardless of which version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking I’m using, I can type exceptionally fast. I’ve even clocked myself typing at speeds up to 150 words a minute using Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9 and that was a huge timesaver I can’t wait to see what I can do with version 10.

Here to for, I’ve generally built videos and tutorials with the unorganized approach of recording some video while I do something and then going back and editing it into something useful.

Today, I was working on a viral video for a client and actually built a story board of the video before I put it together attempting to plan out how I would present the video.

This actually worked pretty well for me, even though the story board turned out to be very rough.

Here’s a quick video showing the MindManager map I used for this situation.

Plus, here is the resulting viral video that I created from the story board draft.

Note. there’s a technical sound glitch in the final product that is the result of a problem with Camtasia’s ability to render 2 tracks of sound and a slow motion video clip at the same time.  I’m hoping to resolve this by reworking the clips in Pinacle.  If that succeeds I’ll add a third movie with the corrected result. For now, there are a couple sections where the volume level is a little buggy.

So now, I have to crack open this new software, get it installed and start learning some advanced techniques.  Coming soon, I will have my office on the fishing dock converted into a green room studio, you won’t even be able to see the patio furniture when I’m done, but I’m not sure what I’ll do when the occasional duck flies through my office.

Here’s a quick little video tutorial that will show you how to shut off the spell check option in MindManager Pro 7.

MM Pro 7 has been upgraded to the new Microsoft Office 2007 standard and the ribbon makes navigating options very fast and easy. However, it is a little tricky to find a few of the more obscure but very necessary options in MindManager Pro 7.

Why would you want to turn off spell check in MindManager Pro 7?

I often times need to shut off the automatic spell check option before I take a screen shot of a mindmap. I do not want to see the little red squigly lines underneath names that are not in the spell check dictionary.

After using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 for several months now I have come to learn that DNS9, requirs a tune up about every 3-4 weeks. I use the speach recognition system extensively and probably dictate close to 50,000 words per month.

Instead of getting more accurate, however the software seems to get confused and loses its way over time. So I run through a simple process to give it a tune up. I simply perform a single training session and it seems to reset the system. Keep in mind that I am not deleting my DNS9 user, I’m not dumping my library or anything like that. In fact I train and add words as I go religiously. It just seems that the program gets buggier as time goes by.

Here’s a demonstration of what I go through to train the software and give it a tune up. This video is edited down and doesn’t show the full process that takes about an hour. This is just a few minutes long and you may want to fast forward through certain sections if you are looking for specific how to answers.