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.

The Visual Lounge, the blog of Camtasia’s parent company TechSmith, named Scraster’s video called Sunday Morning their “Screencast of the Week” yesterday. Part of what TechSmith appreciated about Sunday Morning was how it stretched their software to do something that it wasn’t particularly intended to do. Sunday Morning is more of a slideshow than a screencast, but if there’s no “Slideshow of the Week” honors and it was produced with a screencasting software, let’s call it a screencast! The video, which chronicles the pregnancy of a good friend in a “time lapse” kind of way, is viewable from the player to the left. It’s just one minute long, so please enjoy it before you leave.

As Scraster team leader John Basile explained to Betsy Weber of the Visual Lounge, “I enjoyed using Camtasia for Mac over other slideshow softwares with which I’ve worked because it allows for more control and detail when timing images to audio.” The drag-and-droppable transitions this blog has mentioned before are really tight and are a HUGE timesaver. The movies export nicely to a QuickTime format and there’s a ton of export options to get it to look just right.

As many readers are probably aware, ScreenFlow 2 is set to be released any day now and will have the same kind of time-saving, built-in transitions. Scraster attempted but failed to get its hands on a beta version of ScreenFlow 2 last week, but has been promised a copy to review here and at the scrast.net blog upon its release. Check back for that soon. (Soon? Hope so.)

Scraster is in the business of producing professional screencast tutorials, demos, and marketing videos. Although team leader John Basile produced Sunday Morning as a fun and thoughtful gift for close friends, it’s something we’re happy to add to our menu of services. If you have a multimedia project in mind and think that Scraster would be a good fit to make things come to life for you, please be in touch with Scraster at info@scraster.com of Get a Free Quote.

Dreamforce 2009, the Cloud Computing Event of the Year, is taking place November 17 throught the 20th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. If you’re attending, you know what an important opportunity this is. If you’re a vendor, it’s even more important.

At salesforce.com’s seventh annual user and developer conference, 12,000 customers, partners, and employees will be in attendence for four days with a similar goal in mind: maximizing an investment in salesforce.com and learning from the best how to use the cloud to stay ahead of the competition.

Scraster Professional Screencasting produces high-quality screencast video tutorials and software demos and has experience producing videos specifically for salesforce.com AppExchange applications. Our screencast videos, which can live on the client’s own homepage or as an embed on the AppExchange page, are the most effective way to show off the capabilities and value of a software. A Scraster video is also ideal for presentation scenarios, such as meetings or loop-play from a conference booth. Like Dreamforce 2009!

If you’re a vendor who has something to share with the Dreamforce community and you don’t have a screencast to demonstrate your product or service, you have a problem. Fortunately, Scraster Professional Screencasting has the solution. There’s not a lot of time left, so contact us today to learn how the highly-effective medium of screencast video can capture customers’ attention in what is sure to be a fight for eyeballs at Dreamforce 2009.

Until this week, Scraster Professional Screencasting had been using the online service Vimeo for the hosting of our website and blog video. We considered Vimeo to be the best of the various video hosts around for a number of reasons—the player was nice looking, branding was minimal, call-to-action links could be embedded at the video’s end, and the sharing features would enable the viewer to email, post, or embed the video elsewhere. Our Vimeo Plus account gave us great new HD capabilities that made our HD videos shine, and last but not least, Vimeo’s indexing provided Scraster some pretty strong Google juice.

Understanding that Vimeo’s service is meant strictly for non-commercial use, it was admittedly unprofessional for Scraster to be using (or abusing) Vimeo. It was just so enticing because the product was so perfect. Plans had actually been in place for some time to migrate our content to another service. We just… hadn’t gotten around to it.

The priority of of our migration from Vimeo to another video hosting service came to the fore last week when a high-profile Scraster client disrespectfully embedded a Scraster video in their homepage code. This public sharing of an overtly commercial video hosted by Scraster’s own Vimeo account was pretty quickly followed by the dreaded email saying our content would be removed in 48 hours. Vimeo’s email suggested we quickly find an alternative. I’ve seen and read others online complain about the injustice of the removal of their content, but Scraster understood the risks and we’re happy to move on. We’ll miss Vimeo, but web is constantly in flux, right?

Since January, Scraster has had its eye on screencast.com, the file-hosting end of screencasting giants TechSmith. Screencast.com has become a lot more visible through the huge success of Jing, the free screencapture and screencasting tool for Mac and PC. For Jing users at the basic level, screencast.com is a free storehouse of content captured from the desktop. Screencast.com is actually much bigger than Jing, though, and has developed into a viable CMS for video and other content. With its slick integration with the Camtasia Studio and new Camtasia for Mac screencasting softwares, users can upload their videos straight from the software to the web. And we’re not talking about YouTube-looking video. Let’s get into player details.

Screencast.com plays video as it’s uploaded—no compression or transcoding. This could be a benefit and a drawback. The benefit is stuff looks great in its original form and what you upload is what you get–no lame surprises after twenty minutes of uploading. The drawback is that Mac users have to convert to a Flash format so as not to alienate those users without QuickTime installed. (Exciting note here: Flash 10 can read QT files. When users are up to speed with Flash 10, QT will be fair play for all).

We thought the actual video player from screencast.com was aesthetically perfect for Scraster.com. It wasn’t free, but there was a much larger roadblock–the screencast.com player embed code wasn’t working with Videobox, the unfortunately-named video lightbox script Scraster utilizes at our website and blog to get our vids to jump off the page to be viewed at dimensions much larger than the page could afford. The Videobox script (which is available as a WordPress plugin here) is based on Lightbox v2 and uses swfobject to embed flash. We presume that this was the hang-up for the screencast.com player to work in the plugin.

Fortunately, the development team at screencast.com volunteered to provide Scraster with custom code to get our video lightbox to work. Perfect. We are happy to share the code with you, which gets placed into the “videobox.js” file (which lives within the folder called “js” in the Videobox code) :

else if (sLinkHref.match(/content\.screencast\.com/i)) {
    this.flash = true;
    var hRef = sLinkHref;
    this.so = new SWFObject("http://content.screencast.com/flvplayer.swf","flvvideo",
    this.options.contentsWidth, this.options.contentsHeight, "0", "#000");
    this.so.addVariable("content", hRef);
    this.so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true" );
    this.so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");}
  

With the .js code updated, you’d only have to change the video URL in the code where you want to put the lightbox on your webpage. This URL is not the video’s browser URL. You’ll have to get the link from the screencast.com embed code from the content server. It should look something like this (janky as hell) link:
http://content.screencast.com/users/scraster/folders/scraster.com/media/30fdc023-3034-4d7b-a5b5-32fd18c4cb32/valgen-intro-720.flv

A few notes about the screencast.com player in your lightbox: The allowFullScreen parameter is optional. If it’s set to “true”, then it will allow clicking the full screen button in the player. To set the player to autoplay when the lightbox opens, you can add this param to the .js code above:

this.so.addParam("autostart", "true" );

The screencast.com team doesn’t officially support this Videobox hack, so please try not to bother them with questions about it! Contact Scraster if you don’t understand how this all works and we’ll do our best to help you.

The screencast.com player is great for what it is: a fairly priced platform for easily video content manage with a nice looking delivery system for Scraster’s videos, but there are a couple ways in which we think the service should be improved. One major downfall of screencast.com is that they do not index the contents of the site with search engines. As it’s been thoughtfully described to us by Dirk Frazier, screencast.com’s product manager, this is a complicated situation. Basically, it wouldn’t be fair to the service’s free users–who come to be charged when their bandwith and storage exceeds a certain threshold—if their content was easily searchable. Likewise there are privacy issues. On the other hand, premium account owners like Scraster– who want their content shared as much as possible—don’t get any Google love. And there are no personalized links. To further minimize sharing, there are no “share” options when a video concludes similar to how there are on other web video hosting players like YouTube or Vimeo.

Taking the good with the bad, Scraster is very happy with our new hosting at screencast.com and we now have the peace of mind that our content is not in violation of terms, which is a major relief. We’re once again trading absolute control of our videos (gained only by self-hosting) for the convenience of a nice CMS, but we’re comfortable with that for now. What are your thoughts about screencast.com’s hosting? How’s our new player look? Aside from self-hosting and using a Flash player like JW Player, what are some other options you’d recommend? Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Afterthought: Vimeo also helped Scraster with coding our Videobox lightbox plugin back in February. If you’re using Vimeo (for non-commercial content) and would like to learn how to get Vimeo to work with the a lightbox video player like Videobox, you can read that Vimeo support thread here.

Scraster Professional Screencasting’s latest screencast introduces another bright new cloud-based software firm called Valgen. Valgen is a business intelligence (BI) company headed by a really sharp guy named Parth Srinivasa. Parth tasked Scraster with creating a professional screencast that would distill his complex predictive analytics product into an engaging few minutes of casually narrated video. The subject matter of the Valgen Productivity Suite was at first intimidating, but through Scraster’s collaborative script writing process, our team was able to work with Parth to hone in on the most important aspects of the platform.

Scraster was on a tight deadline to deliver the video in time to be entered into the Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase, a software challenge put on by CRM giant salesforce.com. We’ll find out next week whether Scraster has helped Valgen move a step closer to getting a coveted seat among 39 other leading SaaS app developers. Because this video has the potential to be viewed by a group that Scraster considers its target clientele, we were happy to agree on a lower price for the client in exchange for an extended credit at the video’s end. This kind of branding is something we’ve been doing more and more of with the understanding that 1) times are tight for our clients and 2) creating public awareness of the Scraster brand is as good as gold to us.

A few words about the production of the Valgen screencast. We reverted from Camtasia for Mac back to ScreenFlow for this one simply for reason of ScreenFlow’s kind of cursor effects not being available in Camtasia for Mac yet. Mouse callouts were important to the us and the client, and because we were on deadline, we didn’t want to deal with the Mouseposé mouse highlighting work-around. The sharp motion graphics of this screencast were created by Scraster’s newest team member, Dale Nabeta. We look forward to seeing more of Dale’s work in upcoming videos and are glad to have him on board.

If you are the developer of a salesforce.com app or have an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast like Valgen’s, please visit Scraster’s Get a Free Quote page today. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Thanks for sharing this Valgen video with others. Here’s some short text handy for tweets:
>> Check out the new screencast from @scraster at http://scraster.com/valgen <<