Posts Tagged ‘scrast’

professional iPhone app screencast for VoiceMark

Thursday, January 7th, 2010
    VoiceMark: a professional iPhone app screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

    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!

a professional BlackBerry screencast for 5Touch

Monday, January 4th, 2010
image from http://www.aiga.org

image from http://www.aiga.org

It’s rumored that at Scraster, we only wear black turtlenecks and jeans. That’s just not true. While we adhere to the Steve Jobs dresscode most of the time, Fridays are casual, when Scraster employees are free to wear any color tutrleneck they choose. Likewise, it’s important to make clear that we aren’t all Mac screencasting at Scraster. We produce the same great looking videos we do for Mac and iPhone apps for Windows-based applications. We’re proud to now offer BlackBerry app screencasts as well as screencasts to demonstrate mobile apps on the Android platform.

Our most recent client was a San Jose/Toronto-based mobile software firm called 5Touch, whose new 5TEG mobile platform enables conference and event attendees to access live information such as agenda, map, exhibitor and speaker profiles on their smartphones and use social media channels to share and connect with others. 5Touch tapped Scraster to create a vid that introduced the 5TEG platform using sharp imagery and titling and interactive screen capture from the BlackBerry Storm. Scraster used the finger cursor to create a short, realistic demonstration of how easy and effective the app could be for event attendees. The screencast also illustrates the value of the 5TEG mobile platform to event sponsors, who are part of the target audience as well.

Bob Vaez, CEO of 5Touch, provided Scraster with this glowing testimonial upon the project’s completion:

“Scraster literary saved us 3-4 days of work trying to create a marketing/screencast for our mobile platform. Scraster… was extremely professional, cared about the quality of the work and was responding to our requests around the clock. The process was very well organized, and the result was way beyond our expectation as Scraster was able to tap into its marketing/artistic creativity and go beyond our basic requirement for an online marketing video. I highly recommend Scraster to anyone thinking about doing a screencast to showcase their software, mobile app or website online”.

Thanks, Bob! The pleasure was ours!

If your organization has a mobile product–Blackberry, iPhone, or Android– that you would like to demonstrate through the effective medium of professional screencasting, no one does it better than Scraster. Get a free quote from our website.  Also, feel free to contact us with any questions you have about creating your own mobile screencasts. We’ve got all the kinks ironed out here and would be happy to share what we know. You can email us at info@scraster.com or find us at Twitter, where we’re @scraster.

If you’d like to let your friends or colleagues know where they can have professional BlackBerry screencasts produced, please share the following text via a tweet or a status update:

Looking to do a BlackBerry screencast? @scraster does iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and regular web scrasts: http://bit.ly/5eMMmr

a professional screencast website tour for WorldPoliticsReview.com

Monday, December 7th, 2009
World Politics Review screencast by Scraster Professional Screencasting

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 <<

Need a professional screencast or demo for your iPhone app? Scraster has you covered.

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

iPhone app screencast demo Scraster Professional ScreencastingThe 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.
scraster iphone app screencast demo

Going to Dreamforce 2009? Are you packing a professional screencast?

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

dreamforce09Dreamforce 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 scraster-cloudwith 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.