GigaOM » Screencasts

Screencast: How to Set Your Photoshop Scratch Disk

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:30:53 +0000

Here’s a quick video demonstration of how to set or change your scratch disk in Photoshop CS5 or Photoshop Elements for OS X. If lack of RAM or available disk space is causing crashes, this could be the fix you’re looking for.

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Screencast: The Mac App Store in Action

Darrell Etherington — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:00:44 +0000

Want to see how the new Mac App Store works, but you can’t because you’re at work, using an older version of OS X, or (gasp) a Windows user? Here’s a screencast with a complete rundown of how it looks and works on your Mac.

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WWD Screencast: How to Export Delicious Bookmarks

Simon Mackie — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:00:15 +0000

Updated. The news that Yahoo is may be planning on shutting its popular social bookmarking service Delicious is concerning, particularly if you’ve used it to store a large number of bookmarks. Fortunately, Delicious makes it really easy to make a backup of your bookmarks as an HTML file that you can then import into your browser or into another bookmarking service. Here’s a short video showing how to export your bookmarks:

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WWD Screencast: Boarrd, A Simple Online Dashboard App

Simon Mackie — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:00:54 +0000

Boarrd is an app that enables users to create dashboard consisting of “widgets” that pull information from various sources on the web (calendar feeds, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Github and so on). It could be useful for creating dashboards to keep abreast of project information and updates, or to create a monitoring dashboard to look for mentions of certain terms on social networks, for example. I’ve put together a screencast to show how easy it is to use to create a functional and attractive dashboard, even for non-techies:

Boarrd is free to use. It was created by development firm weLaika in just 48 hours as its entry for the Rails Rumble coding contest. Note: the server is taking a bit of a hammering at the moment and the site is running slowly; adding widgets can take quite a while (I had to cut some of the waiting time from my screencast video). But it does work and it’s worth the wait.

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WWD Screencast: System Ninja

Simon Mackie — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:00:50 +0000

The Web Atom’s System Ninja is a useful free Windows tool for cleaning out the junk that accumulates on your hard drive over time, taking up valuable space and slowing your system down. The app includes a suite of useful tools including a file cleaner, startup manager and process manager. I made a short screencast to show you how it works:

System Ninja is a free download for Windows XP, Vista and 7. It requires the .NET Framework 3.5.

Note: System Ninja is easy to use, but as with all tools that can remove files from your machine, you should exercise caution when using it.

Found a useful utility like System Ninja? Share it in the comments!

(Via freewaregenius)

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WWD Screencast: Embedding PowerPoint and Excel Documents With Office Web Apps

Simon Mackie — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:00:16 +0000

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had added the ability to embed PowerPoint and Excel documents from Office Web Apps into other websites. It’s a really neat feature and very easy to use, so I thought I’d make a quick screencast showing you how it works:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Office Web Apps can be accessed via office.live.com. It requires a free Windows Live account.

Let us know what you think of the updates to Office Web Apps below.

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PrintWhatYouLike Bookmarklet Makes Any Web Page Printer-friendly

Simon Mackie — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:00:29 +0000

PrintWhatYouLike is a free bookmarklet that lets you select regions of any web page and format them to make them suitable for printing. By using its on-the-fly editor to remove the content you’re not interested in before hitting your browser’s print button, you’ll save paper, ink and time.

I made a short screencast to show you how it works:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

What are your favorite bookmarklets? Share them in the comments.

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WWD Screencast: 280 Slides

Simon Mackie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:00:11 +0000

280 Slides is a free presentation web app that’s a bit like having a a version of PowerPoint right inside your browser. It makes it super-easy to create and share presentations online. You can also import and export PowerPoint files from within the app. It’s powerful and simple to use, and as it’s based on the Cappuccino web framework, it doesn’t require any browser plug-ins to work.

I am very impressed with it, and have made a quick screencast showing how it works:

If you need to create a presentation, it’s well worth giving 280 Slides a try.

Have you tried using 280 Slides to create a presentation?

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WWD Screencast: Firefox 3.6 Tab Previews

Simon Mackie — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:30:12 +0000

With the new beta of Firefox 3.6, new tab previewing functionality has been made available in Firefox — you can preview tabs using the “List all tabs” button, and you can see a preview when using Ctrl-Tab to switch between tabs.

These two new features are not enabled by default, so you’ll need to go to the about:config page and toggle “browser.allTabs.previews” and “browser.ctrlTab.previews” to “true” (either right-click on the entry and hit “Toggle”, or just double-click the entry).

I made a quick screencast showing how to enable tab previews and how it works:

(Via gHacks)

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WWD Screencast: Toobla

Simon Mackie — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:00:59 +0000

Toobla is a new social bookmarking service that lets you collect groups of sites together into neat visual folders that you can then easily share with others via a shortened URL or embeddable widget. While it seems to be largely aimed at the consumer market, for web workers, I think it could be useful for sharing collections of inspirational sites during a design project, for example, or resources during a research project. I recorded a screencast showing how it works:

Let us know your thoughts on Toobla in the comments. Do you think it offers advantages over, say, Delicious?

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WWD Screencast: KwiClick Enables Fast, Unobtrusive Searching

Simon Mackie — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:00:44 +0000

Firefox add-on KwiClick lets you perform searches in a small additional browser window, making searches faster and less obtrusive, as you don’t have to open a new tab or window, or leave the page that you’re on. KwiClick can search using Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia and more. To demonstrate how it works, I recorded a quick screencast showing it in action:

WWD Screencast: KwiClick from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

KwiClick is free, works with Firefox 3+ and can be downloaded from the Mozilla Add-ons site.

Let us know what you think of KwiClick in the comments.

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Celtx Offers Free Pre-production for Your Multimedia Content

Samuel Dean — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:00:32 +0000

Many of us are increasingly working with multimedia online, including video and audio applications for everything from podcasts to video tutorials. While well-known tools such as Audacity and Blender can help you deliver slickly produced online audio and video content, really good producers make use of pre-production tools before they even start recording. Celtx is a free, open-source multimedia pre-production application that is very popular for organizing and scripting everything from screenplays, to audio/visual tutorials, to webcasts. You can download it here for Windows, Mac and Linux, and take advantage of an accompanying online Studios environment to collaborate with others on multimedia pre-production.

When you first begin with Celtx, you’re presented with several types of pre-built project templates for filmed content, audio-visual content, and more, as seen below:

Once you’ve chosen what type of content you want to produce, Celtx lets you build a Project Library, where you can house scripted materials, graphics, video and audio content, and more. If you click on the “My Studio” icon seen at right below, the application will take you to Celtx Studios, an online environment where you can collaborate on your pre-production with other people online.

Using Celtx Studios, you can track who you’re working with, and point each other to shared projects:

As you build your pre-production in the Celtx application, you’re gradually building the components in your Project Library on the upper-left of a multi-pane screen, a collection of scenes just below that (with your current scene on the right), and pop-up dialogs for adding materials to all of these repositories. The multi-pane view is seen below:

Celtx has an excellent reputation among professional storyboarders, screenwriters and producers of commercials. Many of us who have been thrown hurly-burly into producing multimedia online don’t have academic pre-production and production backgrounds. Celtx is a good, free way to get help with the pre-production part, which is important. If it interests you, I recommend beginning with these video walkthroughs.

What tools do you use to assist with storyboarding and pre-production?

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4 Free Open-Source Tools for Working With Video and Audio

Samuel Dean — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:00:19 +0000

Increasingly, many of us are working with video and audio online, not just text and still graphics. From video-based marketing materials, to online tutorials, to videocasts and podcasts, multimedia offerings are a great way to engage your audience. Here are four good, free open-source audio and video software tools, including some available in brand-new versions.

Audacity is very widely used for recording and editing podcasts and other audio recording tasks. We covered the new beta version on the OStatic blog. Improvements in the new version include better noise removal tools, faster equalization, support for recording more than 16 channels, and a new “Mixer Board” that provides graphical mixing tools. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines.

Simple Theora Encoder is a very easy video encoding tool for Mac OS 10.4 or higher. It can convert multiple files at once from several different formats, including .avi, .mov, and mp4. Using it is as easy as clicking “Encode,” and that’s it. The application provides a status bar that keeps you posted on the encoding progress and lets you know when your files are ready.

VLC Media Player is one of the best-loved open-source applications. It supports almost every video format under the sun, even the more obscure ones. I recently covered the new portable version of it here, which you can carry on a USB thumb drive. The full application is also out in a new version 1.0. I’ve been using it; it’s outstanding. You can also use it for broadcasting media, rather than just consumption. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

Blender is not only one of the best graphics and animation programs from the open source world, it’s one of the best open-source applications of any kind. Widely used in the professional video and animation communities, it’s great for 3D modeling, animation, rendering and playback. You can also use it on Windows, Mac or Linux systems. You can find a free, online book on it here, and I covered some of the newest features here.

What open-source video and audio tools do you use?

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Quick Tip: Google Search Based on Time

Jenny Kortina — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:00:58 +0000

One of the things I’ve always found frustrating about Google is its inability to perform a search and then filter based on date/time written. Last night I was trying to find out what happened to Axxo (a famous BitTorrent figure), who’s currently missing, and was having a horrible time with it. A few months ago, Axxo had also disappeared, only to reappear a short time later, so when I was searching for “What happened to Axxo,” Google kept finding articles about his previous disappearance instead of his current one. Turns out Google can filter results by time, as I found out while looking for more Axxo information. Here’s how to enable time-based filtering:

Type in and perform your search
On the results page click the “show options…” button in the blue bar
A sidebar will pop out, select “recent results”

Here’s a quick screencast video showing it in action:

WWD Screencast: Google Search Based on Time from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

Another alternative to search news via Google is Google Blog Search. It specifically searches blog articles for whatever you want. One set back to just searching blogs is that you are not searching forums, and often times forums have more current and (sometimes) accurate information.

Have you been using Google’s time-filtered results? Do you think it is or isn’t an important feature based on your web search habits?

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Redliner: Collaborative Editing Made Easy

Simon Mackie — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:00:54 +0000

If you need to collaborate on a document with someone, you can simply email a Word document back and forth, but that can get messy as it’s hard to keep track of the various versions of the document moving around. Or you could use an online document collaboration tool, like Google Docs, Show Document or doingText. Unfortunately, none of the available online tools tend to have a complete feature set. For example, Show Document can’t be used for collaborative editing, and Google Docs doesn’t have a sophisticated commenting system.

Enter Redliner, a new collaborative live document editing tool that marries an online word processor with a commenting and revision tracking system. It is based on Microsoft Silverlight, and even though it’s only in technical preview, the app is quite impressive. The best way to demo it is to see it in action in a screencast:

WWD Screencast: Redliner from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

Redliner is powerful, has smart workflow management features, and looks great. For those used to working with Word, its change tracking and commenting system should feel very familiar, which should make it easy to adopt for even the most non-technical of users. I wonder how it will stack up against the live collaboration tools that will likely be built into the next version of Word, but right now, Redliner is definitely worth checking out (a live demo is available) if you often collaborate on documents with your team.

Redliner is currently free during the technical preview period. When the full version is released later this year, paid monthly accounts will become available.

What tools do you use for collaborative editing?

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Build a Twitter-Monitoring Dashboard Using TweetGrid

Simon Mackie — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:00:27 +0000

There’s a huge amount of interesting conversation happening all the time on Twitter, about your company, your project, and countless other things in which you’re interested. But keeping track of all those conversations is hard. That’s where free web app TweetGrid comes in. It enables you to easily build a monitoring dashboard to track topics by arranging real-time Twitter searches in a customizable grid layout.

While some Twitter desktop clients, like Tweetdeck, have this kind of functionality, Tweetgrid is interesting because it’s a web app; you don’t need to download anything or even need a Twitter login to use it. You can search for terms, hashtags and conversations and you can save your dashboard just by bookmarking the page.

Here’s a quick screencast showing what it can do:

WWD Screencast: TweetGrid from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

What do you use for monitoring Twitter buzz?

(via DownloadSquad)

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