alt Hacker NewsI know I've seen something like this on hackernews before. SaaS for taking over the IDE at any point of a recording, just without the video.
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28207662
Seems this but with a slightly different spin?
EDIT2: Gave it a go. Works as intended, so good job on that. The video being a video, makes it a bit awkward though - if I stop the recording and edit some part, I'd want to see the changes live, but for that I guess I'd have to start the server myself? And when I hit play, my changes got deleted anyway (?).
As for the usefulness aspect, personally I am not sure that this has a benefit over e.g. watching youtube tutorials/following books. I watched one of the videos and I'd have to concentrate on the video, the text and audio at the same time, and it wouldn't be me typing the code anyway, so I'm not sure how much I'd remember of it. I'd have to stop, open a new project and try to rewrite it myself to memorize the concepts deeper. But that's just my personal take - might be that there's a big userbase for such interactive learning!
Replies
I think you mean Scrimba. Yes, it's similar in the sense that in both tools, when you're playing back a recording, you're not looking at the code as a video. But instead the code is there as text. You can pause the recording, look at the files in the project, scroll up and down the editor etc.
The difference is that CodeMic records and replays inside your editor, not on the web. Currently, only VSCode is supported, but the output is independent of VSCode, making it easy to bring it to other editors and even the web.
Another difference is that CodeMic is not focused on web development or any particular stack. It's more general.
> As for the usefulness aspect, personally I am not sure that this has a benefit over e.g. watching youtube tutorials/following books.
I do like YouTube video tutorials, but only as long as they're short. Watching Handmade Hero (by Casey Muratori) for example was a little frustrating: the videos are long, the codebase is large, things are moving fast, and I'd get lost.
I often wished I could pause the video to look up the definition of a function, or get an overview of when each file/line was edited and jump straight to that point.
Books/blogs are ok for explaining large codebases that already exist, but not for following a project as the code constantly changes. The book Crafting Interpreters did a really good job there, but that's really rare and hard to do.
I think CodeMic could be useful for this kind of long-form tutorials.