A few minutes ago I posted video links to the 2010 Sea Level Rise conference. I love the fact that I had listen/watch video lectures and panels which previously were never available. We are lucky to live in such an age of easy availability.
But….
Why do these embedded video players for viewing these lectures never seem to have the ability to fast forward to a later part of the lecture? Not having this feature makes it almost impossible to plan time for these things.
For example, the first talk is 90 minutes long. Suppose I want to listen only to 30 minutes now and listen to the rest later. The way the player streams the content makes that impossible. This seems like such an obvious feature to ask for, and yet it’s surprising how few recorded video players have it.
It’s interesting how often the format/presentation prevents you from viewing or reading something. Most scientific papers are produced as PDF papers. For the most part I never read PDF documents; I’m more used to reading on the web; reading a PDF is painful. Actually that problem has been solved recently with the ipad. now reading PDFs on the ipad are a delight. So much so that I now use the pdf annotation program iAnnotate to mark up my draft PDFs. Over the last week I have marked up a PDF for a technical book while in bed, on an airplane, in an airport, at a restaurant. I am so used to editing directly to the computer screen that I forgot how relaxing it is to edit something without a computer fan whirring in the background.
And if you wonder whether I am annoyed at the thought of having to type/edit this blog post directly from my monitor, you would be right.
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