The current count of iPhone apps available for download is around 100,000. That is a remarkable stat that. Millions of people are downloading apps to their iPhones each day. How, then, is an app developer supposed to rise above the fray and distinguish their product amongst so many others? With a professional screencast demo from Scraster. Scraster Professional Screencasting is happy to extend its expert production services to the iPhone realm. Clients who are serious about taking the marketing of their iPhone app to the next level are invited to contact Scraster for a free quote.
Chris Strode, creator of the popular Invoice2go iPhone app, recently attempted to create a screencast demo in-house. He didn’t think it’d be difficult and was aware of the challenges of passing off an iPhone project. It didn’t take long for Chris to come to the point in the road that many others Scraster clients have come to before reaching out to us–he realized that his skills are best spent on the development end of things, and that the production of a professional-looking video that effectively demonstrated his hard work would be best left to a professional service that could do the app justice. Scraster was happy to help, and Chris was surprised to find that the roadblocks involving the privacy of his source code could easily be averted. Invoice2go ended up with a stunning video.
Producing iPhone app screencasts is, for many reasons, more difficult than traditional screencasting. First, it requires the download and installation of the enormous iPhone SDK and Xcode development environment just to access the iPhone Simulator. The next challenge is getting an app for demonstration installed to the Simulator without the source code. There’s a pretty good tutorial on this subject at thegadgets.net.
Since users of the Simulator can’t install and run apps for which they don’t have code, a lot of amateur scrasts using the Simulator look crumby–the iPhone looks naked and unnatural with no carrier and no apps. Atebits (creators of Tweetie, the popular Twitter client) provided the iPhone screencasting community a gift last spring with the public release a simple but handy tool called SimFinger, “a bundle of little tricks to make a screencapture of the iPhone Simulator suck less”. SimFinger allows iPhone screencasters the ability to load up the iPhone with “fake” apps and also creates the small white cursor effect meant to emulate finger presses, which you’ve probably seen in a lot of well-produced iPhone app scrasts recently. Scraster has hacked its way around several of SimFinger’s limitiations–such as its fixed white background and locked placement of the iPhone to the far left of the desktop–to create the perfect environment for slick looking iPhone video screen capture.
For Scraster’s most recent iPhone app screencast, we were psyched to get our hands on the new ScreenFlow 2. The much-anticipated software update released on October 26th includes the promising feature of being able to speed up clips on the timeline. This has always been possible in advanced video editors like FinalCut, but is unique to screencasting software. It’s clutch for things like iPhone screencasts, where the viewer shouldn’t be made to sit through your screen actions in realtime.
Unfortunately, Scraster found ScreenFlow 2′s clip speed feature to be severely… maddeningly… buggy, and very close to the point of completely dysfunctional. The actual clip speed feature itself worked passably, but when speed was applied to clips on the timeline, audio processing would be effected. There would be either an unacceptable delay in the audio during playback, or the audio would be dropped out all together. The upshot is that ScreenFlow 2′s support team and developers were very responsive to the issue and Scraster has a beta version of the v2.0.2 that proves the known issue will be remedied with the next update. Although the speed transform feature wasn’t ready for prime time at ScreenFlow 2′s (delayed) release and nearly did our heads in, we ended up creating one of our nicest videos to date and the client was ecstatic. And at the end of the day (or week), the client’s approval and the size of their smile is all that matters.
Scraster’s tagline says, “You’ve got better things to do. Scraster does screencasts”. This has never been more true than in the case of professional quality iPhone app screencasting, which throws a couple more monkey wrenches into an already challenging process. Scraster Professional Screencasting offers a cost-effective way to bring our client’s premium iPhone apps into the limelight where they belong. If you’re frustrated with how your in-house iPhone app screencasting is going or you’d like to leave demonstration production to the pros from the get-go, contact Scraster for a free quote today. You’ve got better things to do. Scraster does iPhone app screencasts.
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