Newsletter for August 20th, 2009 - Codename "Screencast Summer"

1. Newsletter Editorial

It's the dog days of summer here in the US Midwest, and it's time for another DC newsletter.  In the last newsletter I announced that I would finally be recording and posting some screencasts showing how to use various features of my larger applications.  I started with a series of about 15 videos demonstrating different features of my Screenshot Captor program, and am now about 20% of the way through a series of about 50 videos on my Find and Run Robot program (yikes!).

So if you've ever wondered what these programs are about, now's the time to stop by the DonationCoder.com blog and have a look -- each video is only a few minutes long and none of them are as painful to watch as the movie Transformers 2.  And I'm happy to announce here that I will am extending the summer of screencasts for another month, and will be posting a new screencast every day all the way through September.  And I reiterate my plea that other coders on the forum take the opportunity to post some videos of their own software.

Next up, some more donationcoder gatherings to tell you about. Let's be honest, these aren't exactly assembly hall conventions, and it's usually just one or two people getting together.  But anyone within driving distance of my house on August 29th is welcome to stop by to have some dinner and play board games -- the dc server admin (john) and his wife (traci) are moving to my neighborhood and are staying with me for a bit and so I figured the more the merrier.  And in germany there will be another gathering at the famous c-base geek club (i wish we had one of those here).  Check the threads below for details and to rsvp.

Lastly.. Baby Cody, the stuffed animal version of the DonationCoder site mascot, has begun his travels around the world visiting donationcoder forum members; you can check out some pictures of him in England in the links below.

Oh, and if you have some web design and user interface skills, please do see the link in section 2 below -- one of your fellow dc members wrote a very fun experimental interactive fiction text "game" and he really needs some help polishing up the user interface.