01/03/14 17:33:14 ¶ ●

An official statement on the future of Mac OS X Screencasts

I have come to a conclusion. This took me some time and it is really hard for me to type this. I wrote about letting go off things recently, and this is the result of this.

The new year has just started out and we are filled with new energy for the things that are ahead of us. Doing new things means that there needs to be room for them.

I am currently working on zCasting 3000. It is the job that I love to do. zCasting would never have been possible without Mac OS X Screencasts. I love doing screencasts, I love explaining things, I love teaching things, and I love to get taught. Three months ago I finally figured out where I want to take zCasting 3000. It took me the entire year to figure this out, it took me another two months to decide that’s really what I wanted, with all the negative thoughts that piled up in my head. Some weeks ago I decided to go for it.

Unfortunately this means I can’t continue to work on Mac OS X Screencasts. This has been a long time coming. Over the past year I rarely published any screencasts, because they just take so much time to produce. One video takes me about 4 days to produce from start to finish. The revenue is 0¹. You can imagine that I can’t continue afford living like that.
In the past year I’ve tried cutting down production time. I made a screencast on the new Keyboard Maestro Debugger. But I was just not happy with it.

Let me tell you about the other things that were going on in the back so that you see that things weren’t standing still behind the scenes.

At the beginning of 2013 I wanted to work on an Alfred tutorial. I prepared for it, and when I was actually going to record, I was told I can’t start. Obviously I was trying to clarify things beforehand, before I booked people, but for some reason the communication wasn’t clear enough. I didn’t take on new projects so that I can fully concentrate on this project for two months. You can imagine how unfortunate it was to hear that all the money and time I invested were going out the window.
I didn’t know what else to do other than working on a reboot of Mac OS X Screencasts. I wanted to start afresh. I wanted a new look and feel for it. The old days where the website was mainly black were soon to be gone; so I thought. We started working on the site and were almost finished in March. Almost means that some technical difficulties prevented us from continuing the work. These weren’t resolved until June or July or so. Part of the reason I couldn’t concentrate was a split up with my 4-year girlfriend. I had to move out of our flat and find a new one quickly. You can imagine what a seamless transition this was. I had no time and energy at hand to push Mac OS X Screencasts forward.
Finally when things settled in I was able to get the content moved.

At the beginning of last year I decided that my big goal of 2013 should be to make zCasting 3000 a real company. This was sitting in my head for the entire year. Because of this I was unable to focus on MOSX and lead the reboot. It was just not important enough. The new thing was so much bigger and more interesting.

The name should change. I wanted something new. Something that doesn’t have the word “Mac”, or “i” in it. MOSX seemed appropriate because I was using this shortening already. You can look at the new design here: drupal.macosxscreencasts.com (This is also where you will find the Debugger tutorial. Watch it and you will understand that I’m not happy with it.)
Drupal should be at the core of MOSX. Drupal as CMS has the power to make the site fully multi-lingual (plus some other niceties). Something I could never pull off using WordPress. Most icons used should be fully Retina ready, also preparing for Retina screencasts.

I recorded some footage too. On my disk is an almost-finished recording of a Keyboard Maestro tutorial. In this two hour tutorial I go through everything I know about this app. Its last chapter is labelled “Markdown for Keyboard Maestro”. That’s right. In this chapter I was going to rebuild all Markdown macros from scratch so that you know exactly how they work and are able to make better macros for yourself. In the end it’s not about me, I am doing this because I want people to build better things. That’s what kept me going.

I was so focused on other stuff though that I wasn’t able to lead these projects to the end. This has destroyed MOSX so much for me that I almost don’t want to look at the site anymore.

What does all of this mean?

The website will not be shut down.
The website will continue to run.
You will be able to purchase the Hazel tutorial, and you will receive full support for anything related to this video.
At the moment I can’t say if or ever new videos will come out. I would say it’s unlikely.
I won’t respond to any mails regarding Mac OS X Screencasts-de and Mac OS X Screencasts-com.
I will continue to write my blog on Tumblr. More on this below.

The blog

My blog is something that I still enjoy writing for. You have seen the amount of articles plummet. In the recent months I have been focusing more on insightful and valuable content. From what I’ve heard, my readers quite enjoy to read these. So I would like to continue writing them.
This is the icing on the cake, if you will. When I started this blog, I focused heavily on apps, technology, and ads. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy technology, but I’m just not the student, that I used to be when I started Mac OS X Screencasts, anymore. My life has changed so dramatically over the last ten years and I think this directly reflects into my writing.

Now that Mac OS X Screencasts doesn’t need to generate revenue anymore, I am free to write whatever I want here. So I will do just that. I hope you find this an agreeable arrangement.

Final words

I sincerely wish that you understand my decision and how hard it was to make. I don’t want to let MOSX die, but it is more important to move on. Now that zCasting has a foundation, a credo, and an idea for a place for people to work at, it is time to build walls and roof.