NSScreencast: Bite-sized Screencasts for iOS Development

by eloisius • 14 years ago

56 14 14 years ago

You should consider featuring a free preview somewhere prominently on the page. Most people won't think to click your RSS button to find them. I know it says "free videos" right there on the button, but it's still very easy to miss.

subdigital3• 14 years ago

Thanks, that's a good point. In the beginning, when I didn't have a lot of episodes, the free ones were easier to find. I'll be adding a quick way to see all the free videos on the site soon.

alpb• 14 years ago

This is good but I'd rather prefer paying for individual items or buying credits. A subscription model is not efficient for customers, I think. I am a fan of NSHipster blog but I also would love such tutorials and screencasts. But at this moment this is very inefficient.

subdigital3• 14 years ago

I've considered it in the past. There hasn't been much demand for it. Can you suggest the idea at http://nsscreencast.uservoice.com so people can vote on it?

pfisch• 14 years ago

Do people pay for things like this? Seems like you could just google some free examples or just look at stack overflow.

Groxx• 14 years ago

Stack Overflow has reams of bad advice for Objective C. The dominant suggestions (that I encounter, anyway) routinely come up at the next-year's WWDC as things you should not ever do for any reason (and then they continue to be the dominant suggestion for another year).

Not that there isn't a lot of good, free resources out there. Apple's documentation being the most important and valuable example. But someone has to fill in the gaps, and I will happily argue that it can be worth quite a lot of time and money to learn something correctly rather than waste many hours due to bad advice. I haven't looked through these in particular, but yes, people pay for things like this, and they can definitely be worth it.

Appdanowicz• 14 years ago

"Stack Overflow has reams of bad advice for Objective C. The dominant suggestions (that I encounter, anyway) routinely come up at the next-year's WWDC as things you should not ever do for any reason (and then they continue to be the dominant suggestion for another year)."

Can you provide some examples of this?

up_and_up• 14 years ago

He is basing his business model off of Railscasts: http://railscasts.com/

Which is a highly successful screencast site.

For $9/ month you get vetted solutions to real world problems found in the Ruby and Rails domains. I see a similar offering in iOS land to be a win.

eloisius• 14 years ago

I definitely do. Being reimbursed by my employer helps make it easier, but I find value in things like this, Railscasts, Destroy All Software, etc...

It's not that I couldn't google for the answers when I meet with a specific problem. Often I'm not aware that there is a problem because my software works but I'm missing out on a really awesome design pattern that I don't know about.

These productions help serendipitously introduce me to new knowledge.

WestCoastJustin• 14 years ago

I am a very happy railscasts (http://railscasts.com/) customer. It is nice to watch a 5-10 minute episode while having coffee. I would total recommend this to any rails devs. For 9/month how can you go wrong?! Some of the things that I like:

- explains the problem, give you the solutions out there, then shows how to implement the solution he likes, also overviews and gotchas

- sometimes a topic is totally new but you might find it useful later! This is what I actually find most useful, since it puts new ideas on your radar that are in your domain.

- if i want to implement a new feature, I'll often check railscasts. Watch the episode while programming, it is like having someone walk you through the process before you do it yourself.

ozgung• 14 years ago

I was considering to pay until I saw your post. I think this is an excellent business model and online education is something I'm willing to pay. Internet is full of content on any subject but organized content like on Coursera or Udemy always delivers some added value.

Screencasts are also my preferred way of learning something. If the instructor is a good programmer you always learn things much beyond the code itself.

PeteOnSoftware• 14 years ago

Well, I for one paid for it. 9.00 a month is a small amount to pay for my own education. I watched the free videos and gained enough from those videos that I felt there was value. On top of that, Ben is churning new videos out constantly, so the ongoing value was there, too. This is much better quality than what you find by googling or by hitting Stack Overflow. If your time is valuable, pay the $9 and get up to speed in a hurry in one place rather than trying to piece together things from a variety of sources with varying quality.

subdigital3• 14 years ago

Really appreciate the vote of confidence. Incredibly humbling, and I thank you!

rutherfj• 14 years ago

I love this screencast series. What makes it so successful (IMHO) is that each weekly screencast is short enough to watch during a lunch or coffee break. Every week there is something useful. When somebody asks me how to learn Obj-C/iOS development, one of my first recommendations is to subscribe to this.

NSScreencast: Bite-sized Screencasts for iOS Development

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