We are looking very closely at Apple’s Podcast Producer for use in and around campus. I wrote a little about it the other day while sitting in a meeting … this morning I opened the QuickTime player on my MBP to record a very quick piece of audio. When I went to the export it I saw a “Share …” option in the File menu. Not remembering that from the QT Player in 10.4 I decided to check it out. What I saw really surprised me … an option to share the file to a Podcast Producer server.

What that means to me is that I can open QT Player anywhere, record audio/video, and instantly publish it to our Podcast Producer Server. I haven’t looked at it beyond that, but it certainly makes me realize there is big power coming together here. With a chain like iTunes U, Podcast Producer, simple creation tools, and facilities on campus to help people make digital content, sharing just got a whole heck of a lot easier. I will be interested to see how/if workflow can be invoked from a simple “Share …” command in QuickTime. If it can, the possibilities for quick and easy content creation and distribution is only limited to what one could dream up. I wonder in the Windows version of QT Player can do this?

I’ll share more as we get further down the path. I am also curious to see what happens when I click the login button … will it give me a new set of options to invoke custom workflows? If that is the case we can build workflows to put things in all sorts of places … want to publish to an iTunes U course space? Done. Want to publish via your Blog? Done. Want to push it to our streaming server? Done. I am hoping the integration I see lets me take the final step and really create once and publish to many environments.