Scraster Professional Screencasting’s founder and head screencaster John Basile was recently featured on Telestream’s ScreenFlow blog called The Screening Room. Since it’s John writing this post, let’s go ahead and switch out of third person and into the first. Done.

The Screening Room has been blogging strong–featuring teasers of upcoming releases, ScreenFlow tips, company news, and user profiles since around the time of their ScreenFlow 2 product launch in the fall of 2009. The folks at Telestream have done a good job of creating a much-needed and much-appreciated community around their popular screencasting software for Mac. (Next on the list: a crowdsourced idea portal for feature requests).

A few weeks ago, I was pleased to get a direct message on Twitter from Lynn Elliot, the main author of The Screening Room blog, which was complimentary of Scraster’s recent professional screencast work. I gladly accepted Lynn’s invitation to contribute to the regular “Meet the Screenflow-er” feature of the blog and was sent the standard Q&A via email. It was fun to share info about Scraster’s workflow and I was able to link to some of our work. There hasn’t been any noticeable swell of web traffic to scraster.com, but the exposure is super and I’m very grateful for it.

There was one question from the Q&A was particularly challenging to answer. It asked, “Do you have a screencast that you’re especially proud of? And why?” I referred to some recent professional screencast work, but also thought hard to word my answer as diplomatically as Screencasts Online producer Don MacAllister did few months back: “That’s a hard one! Each one seems to get better as I get more experienced!” Don said in his Q/A. I suppose this is the case with most creative work. It is certainly the case at Scraster Professional Screencasting, where our work continues to get better and better and we’re continually proud of the quality work we’re selling our clients.

Go to John’s Q/A at The Screening Room blog

The newest professional screencast by Scraster demonstrates Fluid, a great app for Mac users who rely heavily on web-based softwares like Google Docs, Basecamp, and Pandora. Fluid.app is a software that creates apps out of online tools so that they can be launched from the Mac OSX dock, be kept in their own windows, and controled with Preferences similarly to how other regular applications can be.

Scraster Professional Screencasting produced this Fluid screencast using TechSmith’s new Camtasia for Mac screencasting software. It was Scraster’s first serious experiment with Camtasia for Mac and we’re really happy with the end result. As you may or may not know, Scraster has been ScreenFlow-based since we opened our shop. While we haven’t dumped Telestream’s ScreenFlow, we definitely have a growing *crush* on Camtasia for Mac!

We were asked to hold off on posting this vid until the proper release date of Camtasia for Mac, which is today. Now you can DL a free trial of the app at TechSmith.com, where you can also buy a specially-priced copy for $50 less than its normal $150 price tag. John Basile, Team Leader at Scraster Professional Screencasting, is in the process of writing a full review of Camtasia for Mac which will be published by scrast.net, the screencasting website, in the next day or two. The scrast.net Twitter feed has mentioned that the site will have several copies of the software to give away in the coming days, so be on the lookout.

Well, this post came to be more about Camtasia for Mac than about its original subject, which was Fluid. If you’re on a Mac, you should check out Fluid asap. Download it for free at http://fluidapp.com and then collect some great looking icons for your new Fluid apps here on Flickr. You’ll be glad you did. If you come to enjoy Fluid, please forward this video on to your friends via the “share” tool on the player or tweet this URL: http://scraster.com/fluid Thanks!

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

For the last couple of weeks, Scraster Professional Screencasting has been on a short hiatus from custom screencasting work for clients. Instead, we’ve been working on the launch of an exciting new project at scrast.net. scrast.net is a site devoted to the screencasting industry, its community, and those folks interested in learning more about the medium. The new screencasting website at scrast.net is still a work in progress, but already, you’ll find news and product reviews, links to professional screencasters, featured screencasts, and more.

Another useful feature of the new scrast.net is the ScreenFlow idea portal at screenflow.scrast.net. It’s no secret to ScreenFlow fans that the user forum at the Telestream website is severely lacking. With no help in sight from Team Telestream, the new idea portal at screenflow.scrast.net introduces a better system for contributing feature requests and discussing ideas for improvement. Based on the crowdsourcing concept of sites like Digg and Wikipedia, the voting system of screenflow.scrast.net assures that the ideas that matter most to ScreenFlow users will surface to the top and to the attention of the software’s developers. The end result will hopefully help keep ScreenFlow in its pole position in the Mac screencasting market. Please share the link with any ScreenFlow users you know because the portal’s true strength is based on the number of contributors and voters. Here’s a TinyURL for tweets: http://tinyurl.com/sf-s-net. Thanks as well for tweeting and otherwise speading the word about http://scrast.net, where “it’s all about screencasting”.

By the way, both Scraster Professional Screencasting and scrast.net are on Twitter. Thanks for following either or both!