A Nice Video Podcast on Objective-C by Robert Van Slooten

Last night I found a nice podcast on Objective-C from my iTunes. The podcast is called as Cocoa Touch Netcast (CTN), hosted by Robert Van Slooten. The first show was published on February 2(Tuesday), 2010. Up till now, it is the 2nd episode of part 3.

What I Like

I really enjoyed the shows. First I like the structure and design he created those shows. He uses slides, screen captures(by using Quicktime recorder?), and pictures. All those are easily available or to do on iMac. In most cases, one or more slide shows outline clear and important points or a block of codes first. After that, a screen capture with an animation transition is smoothly connected to a live show of XCode and an example project with codes. He also uses related pictures during the show or at the end. This is nice change or tone on the screen. He must make some efforts to search for those pictures.

The second feature I like is that each show is very short, from 5 minutes to over 20 minutes(but less than 30 minutes). That's really cool to cover so much information or complicated concepts in such short period of time. His voice is clam, slow and clear, and his words or sentences are effectively terse. For some complicated concepts, he uses very brief key words to get the point related to the context. I always try to consider too much when I try to explain something. Cocoa and ObjC are very comprehensive and rich frameworks. In stead of throwing out extensive and unrelated information, he starts from a simple and clear path to the point. Sometimes, he jumps to thousand feed high to give an overall view, without any fear to confuse viewers with new and unknown terms or concepts. If there are some example codes, there is just one project per show. I admire his knowledge and teaching skills. As a viewer or learner, I had great time to enjoy his shows!

What I Hope

One thing I feel not comfortable sometimes when I hear music with pictures when I have my headset on. The sound are little bit too loud, comparing to the previous clam and slow speech, especially at the end of show. The volume can be adjusted to the same level of speech.

Another thing I think he could improve is to add English subtitles on his show and also make it as an option to show or hide, just like WWDC10 shows. Apple uses podcast producer to generate podcasts. Not sure if the application has any tool to generate scripts or not. If it is possible, that would be great.

References

By googling "cocoa touch netcast", I found Robert's podcast web page. I think that he uses MobileMe to host his shows. During the loading time in my browser I saw the loading status showing data from www.me.com. Robert also includes his show codes on the web.

I think Robert is a Canadian. The show of P2-E6 on Properties shows a picture of his boat(?) with a Canadian flag.