Teambox is an interesting new project management tool that bridges the gap between real-time social media like Twitter and web-based project management solutions like Basecamp. Pablo Villalba, the creator of Teambox, found Scraster online a few days after a major write-up on the popular blog ReadWriteWeb. Too bad that Scraster’s video couldn’t have been live before that major press, but not to worry–Teambox will be getting its share of press very soon. In fact, just this morning, Teambox was featured on TechCrunch.

Teambox’s objective in creating a screencast was to minimize bounces and grab visitor’s attention for a viewing experience that would lead to conversions. Teambox came to the right place, because site retention is what Scraster screencasts are all about.

We’re happy to be associated with Teambox, who we consider to be a client with enormous potential. We’re also very glad that Teambox was 100% psyched about their delivered video from the moment they saw it. Since the ESL office of Teambox is in Spain, Teambox relied heavily on Scraster’s expert script writing to guide the process. We gleaned a cursory understanding of the app during a Skype screenshared walkthrough by the client, and within a couple of days, we were engrossed in the elaborate script.

Because of the collaborative nature of Teambox, the screencast script required not just a single user case, as is the norm, but a demonstrative scenario of an entire team of users. We decided that a small freelance web team would be a realistic way to communicate Teambox’s value and set a Project Manager named Frank at the video’s focal point. Frank and his team guide the user through a few multi-user scenarios to demonstrate Teambox’s major selling points. (One very fun part of creating a full-blown scenario like this? Hiding the Easter eggs.)

While the elaborate Teambox script and site set-up involved a lot of time and work, the effort wasn’t entirely on our end; the Teambox team made an invaluable contribution by being constantly on call to answer questions and to clear things out of the system when Scraster needed “a second take”. The results speak for themselves. Teambox was so pleased with their video that they blogged about their Scraster experience.

Like most of Scraster’s professional screencasts, the Teambox video was created in ScreenFlow with a handful of other tools. Thanks to Javier Saldeña, a Bay-Area based graphic artist, for his help bringing the Teambox logo to life in the AfterEffects bumpers.

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one Scraster Professional Screencasting produced for Teambox, please be in touch. You can get the ball rolling with a free quote. You can also email us at info@scraster.com or info@scraster.com or find us on Twitter.

We’d love to spread the word about Teambox, so please consider tweeting the following 128 characters:

Got 4:20? Check out the @scraster screencast for Teambox, a cool new Twitter-ish project management tool: http://bit.ly/9NuzYO

Thanks for reading. More soon.

One of the most gradifying aspeccts of professional screencasting is being exposed to so many cool new apps and web services. This professional screencast Scraster recently finished introduced us to two cool new applications–first, our newest client Timebridge and second, a popular app with which TimeBridge has partnered, called Evernote.

TimeBridge is a web app that makes it easier to “schedule and run great meetings”. Through an integration with your desktop or web-based Calendar client, Timebridge users are able to see each other’s availabilities and plan accordingly. No more sending invitations back and forth through email. There’s also a number of ways that TimeBridge can improve the organizational process of putting a meeting together. Who doesn’t need TimeBridge?

Evernote is a popular desktop and mobile app that is said to serve as your “external brain”. It’s pretty damn unbelieveable. Evernote takes OCR to another (almost sfi-fi) level, whereby you can take a picture of something textual with your iPhone and viola-it goes right into your searchable Evernote archive. There’s a lot more, so do yourself a favor and visit the Evernote website.

Scraster is happy to be working with Timebridge on a few other videos to explain how the tool integrates with major email clients. We’re happy that the Timebridge team realizes how effective video can be in their goal of reaching a critical mass with their platform, whose true strength is in the growing number of people that use it.

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast, get a free quote from Scraster Professional Screencasting today. You can also email us at info@scraster.com or find us on Twitter at @scraster.

Most of the inquiries coming to Scraster’s inbox these days are for iPhone and mobile screencasts. The demand for mobile app demonstrations is as limitless as that industry’s growth, so it’s a good time to be in Scraster’s position–we have the resources and the skill to be producing some of the best mobile app screencasts online. As our vids circulate and catch eyeballs, developers are lining up to get their own.

Scraster’s latest iPhone app screencast was produced for VoiceMark, the flagship app of a sharp software firm called GeoGrafffiti. Voice Mark by GeoGraffiti is an iPhone app used to record voice messages about a specific locations. Voice Marks are geotagged to a point of interest and made available for the public to hear via any telephone. The script reads, “With an iPhone3G, it’s easy to Voice Mark the world and create audio geotags with your opinions and advice… or search and listen to Voice Marks already created in your specific area of interest”. You can download the app (it’s free!) at geograffiti.com.

Scraster had fun producing this cool iphone screencast to introduce VoiceMark. We were given the liberty of adding some personal touches, like including the VoiceMark of a friend for the audio demonstration portion of the video. We also got to throw in a plug for Yoshi’s, our favorite Oakland jazz club, and use some of our other favorite spots around town for the VoiceMarks we created to demonstrate the app.

One of the bigger challenges of producing professional screencasts is keeping the viewer visually engaged when there are lulls in screen action, for which we have a few strategies. The first is utilizing zooms, which give the video a sense of screen action where there is none. Highlighting screen areas also works in this way. Animation can sustain the video between sections of screen capture, but animation is very time consuming and is most often cost prohibitive for the client.

Another effective method of spicing up video lulls in screencasts is to use the font of the client’s brand to create eye-popping text overlays to spice things up. The enhanced text seen in the VoiceMark video, which was all created in Photoshop using GeoGraffiti’s style guidelines, really pops and adds a lot to the video. The animated transitions of the text makes it all the more effective.

VoiceMark CEO Chad Cook came to Scraster with a great looking app and brand identity, and Scraster took the ball and ran with it to create something that Chad hadn’t imagined. We were happy to receive the following testimonial from Chad:

“The results Scraster delivered exceeded expectations with original ideas and solutions, all within budget and deadlines. They are experts in the field of screencast demonstration”

If your organization has an iPhone app or an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like the one we created for VoiceMark, via email or on Twitter. Wanna share the VoiceMark video with your networks? Here’s some tweetage (92 characters) for your convenience:

Here’s a nice looking iPhone app screencast demo produced by @scraster: http://bit.ly/8lqcSn

Thanks for reading. More real soon!

Scraster Professional Screencasting recently produced a screencast for World Politics Review, a premium provider of information and analysis on international affairs found online at worldpoliticsreview.com. The general manager at WPR approached Scraster with a familiar problem among paid-content websites: “We have all this great content behind our homepage, but we’re afraid people don’t know it’s there”. It was the objective of WPR to create a site tour that would show off the site, inside and out. WPR wrote most of the screencast script, and Scraster took control from there. The end result is an engaging screencast that servers two main purposes. First, the video is a introduction of WPR to new visitors who are unfamiliar with how to navigate the content-rich free side of the site. As well as giving unsubscribed visitors a cursory tour of the free content, the later part of the WPR screencast invites free users to consider the many benefits of WPR’s premium subscription service, which include a wealth of additional reports, downloads, and other exclusive content.

If you manage subscription-based website or have a premium online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like WPR’s, please visit Scraster’s Get a Free Quote page today. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Thanks for sharing this World Politics Review video with others. Here is some short text that is handy for tweets:
>> Check out the new screencast from @scraster at http://scraster.com/wpr <<

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.