I work as a media developer in the field of continuing education or distance education. Some of the things I do is setup classrooms for recording, train faculty and student staff to run the recordings, edit the recordings, and publish the recordings for the web. It is a job that is constantly changing. Maybe not so fast that you can see the change in one semester, but over a year there is usually change. There are constant updates. Back in the early days of computers you made a program and you had one shot at it. It was burned to a CD and that was it. Today, we have updates and new versions. What were we thinking back then? Of course you worked harder to get your program to work right. Now programs automatically check if there is an update and ask you if you want to install the update. That is the norm. I understood this at one point but people weren’t ready for a change. They thought that a program had to work right the first time and had no patience for updates. Now that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I think it is good as bugs are detected and fixed, new features are added. But at one point it was all or nothing. I don’t cherish those days as the stress was enormous.
Now if I miss an edit. I just make the edit and re-post. That doesn’t even rarely happen. More likely faculty decide some part of their lecture doesn’t work after all and they want it out. It is an easy fix. This occurs before the video is released to the public.
What is stressful now is the number of platforms. There is android, iOS, OSX, 7 flavors of Windows. There isn’t one platform to publish in to, there are several. And tools and standards are constantly changing. Flash was the technology, html 5 is the future. Companies are coming out of nowhere, old giants are disappearing. And there are new versions of all the creative tools every 18 months. And, a real stress is that the model for software is changing. No longer is the perpetual licenses the norm. Now you have to pay a subscription every month for Adobe or Microsoft tools. This means more money to these companies plain and simple. Some developers are revolting and looking for new players in the development tools market. We shall see. I am not ready to go to a subscription for Adobe CC. But when my job requires it, that new tools have an advantage, I guess that will be the time to move. So, I stay with an older version of MS Office and older version of Adobe Web Premium. They really aren’t adding features they just want more money.
So I am looking at the market, at the little guys that aren’t well known. They may only provide some of the tools I need but together with other little players I can get the job done.