I’ve been looking for ages for some easy-to-use animation software, preferably vector, where I can design simple product videos or video tutorials. I tried many of them, but none of them was quite user friendly for a newbie.
I always liked drawing in Microsoft PowerPoint. Sometimes I created simple pictures or schemes in it, recently I drew a QetriX Logo. And then it hit me – why don’t I use PowerPoint as an animator? It supports export presentation as WMV (Windows Media Video), even the final quality is not quite good and max output resolution is 960x720.
First step is to change slide size from default 4:3 to 16:9, using “Page Setup” button on a “Design” tab. If you do it later, the graphics will be deformed (following the change of an aspect ratio) and you’ll have to change the scale of a size from 133 % back to 100 % (in Format Picture / Format Shape, then Size).
Second step is to define all objects in the slide. You can use various shapes, such as lines, circles, rectangles, polygons, arrows and much, much more. You can also add some text. It doesn’t matter, if you choose Text Box or a Word Art – it’s the same.
You can use more slides, or just a single one. I definitely recommend more slides, because sometimes on a single slide it gets quite complicated :)
Now add some (tasteful!) animations for shapes/pictures and transitions between slides as well. Less is more, don’t get carried away and make something like 1990s website. You can make some gorgeous stuff, but you need to play with it a little.
I’m not going to describe the full process of creation, because there’s tons of options and it’s not that hard to figure it on your own.
You can add some music and/or narration as well.
When your job is done, choose “Create a video” in “Save & Send” option. Make sure quality is set to Computer & HD displays and click to “Create Video” button.
Now wait, until it’s fully rendered and there you go.
I wrote about [2013/02#prehistory-of-qetrix prehistory] of QetriX, now I'd like to write about it's history.
The first foray was a wiki encyclopedia QeXpedia (enc.qex.cz, 09/2006 – 07/2007). I planned to extend the article-based core by so-called “extended database schema”, but it ended up just as an idea.
But based on this idea I created Kilopedia (02/2007 – 03/2008). The name was derived from limiting size of an article to 1024 characters (1 kB), because it was focused on mobile applications. This limit was introduced just because the whole project was supposed to be primarily around the extended database schema with articles just as an addition.
This was as a result of my dissatisfaction with Wikipedia, where you have to create a semi-complex page and elaborate, even if you just want to put the thing in. Moreover, it must be done like this for every single language, whilst semantic data would be sufficient for the time being. WikiData existed, but wasn't a thing yet at that time.
This time I did create the extended database schema. For every category I had a table in the database and created a schema-aware editor, that generated and processed edit forms accordingly. It worked pretty well, but still didn't felt right.
Nevertheless, it fitted nicely together with my diploma thesis “Server Orientated Data Processing in Mobile Applications” (2006-2008), for which I also created a multiplatform (mobile+desktop) client application and XML structure definitions for form and data.
In the late 2009 I started experimenting with a single-table schema. The idea wasn't new, it first emerged in 2003 for Multiportal QeX (2001-2006) in it's third iteration as an effort to be able to create any kind of content (picture, table, poll etc-) among discussion board posts. Original author of this idea was the co-author of QeX, Paul.
At first I tried module-attribute (EAV) model, later I added a third table for relations. But every one of them required a dedicated enum for types and together with tables for users and system stuff it bloated too much for my taste. So I started reducing them.
I figured out those three tables (modules, attributes, relations) overlapped quite a bit, so on November 18-19, 2009 I tried to reduce them to a single table. From 18 tables I went down to just 6.
A column for value in “data” table was obvious, but I didn't want to use it for foreign keys of relations as well. So I added an extra numeric column, which looked promising. In fact, that was the major decision for the QetriX Data Particle. Later I added an extra decimal column for combined order and significance (e.g. 3.14 would mean significance = 3 and order = 14).
I developed QPDB (QetriX Particle DataBase) side by side with my CMS Dynamic (2009-2011), a successor of XMS (2005-2010). First release of QPDB was at the end of February 2010. Initially QPDB was supposed to be a module of Dynamic, but the delight from totally sufficient two-table design prevailed, so I wrote-off Dynamic instead and it's good parts ported to QPDB.
Eventually I named this new system “Q3S”, an essential server-side part of the whole QetriX at that time. In about six months, after some performance tests, I decided to split the combined decimal column into two numeric ones and few years later I merged them to a single numeric column.