The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Online demo?

(Looks like the search function doesn't run)

Besides www.qarbon.com, are there tools you would recommend to record a demo, preferably viewable through a web browser (eg. not Lotus ScreenCam, which requires downloading a reader + the demo file)?

Frederic Faure
Monday, November 10, 2003

Windows media encoder is pretty good; the problem is in the licensing.

Stephen Jones
Monday, November 10, 2003

http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp

Camtasia Studio is pretty great. You can make AVIs and Flash movies, and it has a lot of editing capabilities. It's _way_ cheaper than Qarbon, and IMO easier to use.

Tim Sullivan
Monday, November 10, 2003

Here is a list of other products which create Flash demos for software products.

I haven't tested any of them yet.

InstantDemo http://www.instant-demo.com/index.htm

TurboDemo http://www.turbodemo.com

RoboDemo http://www.ehelp.com/

BB Flashback http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/bbflashback.aspx

ViewletBuilder http://www.qarbon.com/

MX
Monday, November 10, 2003

We looked through them all and decided on ViewletBuilder. We've been extremely happy with it and highly reccomend it.

--Josh

JWA
Monday, November 10, 2003

Thx everyone :-)

Frederic Faure
Monday, November 10, 2003

How about Camstudio? Great Software and free....nothing can beat it!

http://www.ehelp.com/camstudio/product/screenrecording/ehelp.asp

Code Monkey
Monday, November 10, 2003

VNC lets you remote-control a computer (like Timbuktu or PCAnywhere) and there is software available that lets you record your session as an .swf (shockwave flash) file.
http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/

Also, Timbuktu (on the Mac side) will let you record your session (connected to Mac or PC) as a Quicktime movie. It's an uncompressed animation so it's huge but it will stuff small (I've seen a 100 MB file stuff to 1 MB) or you can run it through QuickTime Pro ($30) and compress it there (MPEG-4, etc.) Timbuktu is about $80 or $90/seat.

Hint: no matter what course you take, set your "to be recorded" screen to the lowest resolution & bit depth possible. You can record your demo at, say, 800x600, and if no one needs to read the text, you can shrink it to whatever you want, like 480x360, to fit in a browser better.

brian
Tuesday, November 11, 2003