GigaOM » Collaboration

WWD screencast: How to use Google Calendar appointment slots

Simon Mackie — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 11:06:11 +0000

Google has rolled out appointment slots, a useful new feature for Google Calendar that allows users to publish available appointment times on a publicly available calendar that other users can then book. For example, a manager could use appointment slots to indicate available times for meetings with team members.

Appointment slots are shown on a booking page, which you can embed on a website or share with colleagues or clients. People visiting that page will then have their own personal calendar overlaid over the available appointment slots and can click to book a time; a shared calendar event is then created for both users.

Here’s a short screencast showing how to set up appointment slots and how the booking process works:

Google Calendar’s appointment slots are easy to use and should greatly streamline the process of booking appointments, eliminating email back-and-forth. However, unlike dedicated meeting scheduling tools like TimeTrade, Tungle and Setster, which also offer this kind of appointment-booking functionality but only require the person advertising their availability to sign up for the app, Google’s feature requires both the person broadcasting their availability and the person booking the appointment to use Google Calendar. So while appointment slots will probably be very useful within companies where everyone is using Google Apps, it’s not going to be suitable for, say, a personal trainer offering appointment bookings on a publicly accessible website.

Note: While I have access to the appointment slots feature on my Google Apps account, I don’t yet see it on my personal Google Calendar, so it may be that it hasn’t been rolled out to all users yet.

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WWD Screencast: Frame Box

Simon Mackie — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:00:57 +0000

Frame Box is a simple drag-and-drop tool for creating and sharing wireframes, which can be useful during the website design process to illustrate the structure of a page without getting bogged down in the details. I made a short screencast to show you how it works:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Frame Box is free and really easy to use. You don’t even have to sign in to try it out, but signing in with a Google, Twitter or Facebook account enables you to save your work.

(via One Thing Well)

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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:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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: Group Chrome Tabs With Tab Sugar

Simon Mackie — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:00:26 +0000

Firefox-using “taboholics” — people who always have an excessive number tabs open — may have been enjoying Tab Panorama, a feature introduced in Firefox 4 beta 4 that enables users to arrange their tabs into groups via a neat drag-and-drop interface. Chrome-using tab addicts may have been a little envious, but they now have Tab Sugar, an extension that basically replicates Tab Panorama in Chrome.

I made a short screencast to show it in action:

It looks pretty slick, but it’s still in alpha and is a little buggy on my Mac: Database errors flash up from time-to-time and it sometimes seems to have trouble remembering my tab groupings. So unfortunately I can’t recommend it for day-to-day use just yet, but if the developers can iron out the issues, it’s certainly a promising extension. In the meantime, Chrome-using taboholics can either switch to the beta of Firefox 4 to take advantage of the Tab Panorama feature, or try the tab chunking strategy outlined here.

If you’d like to try Tab Sugar it can be downloaded from the Google Chrome Extension Gallery.

Are you a “taboholic”? What strategies do you use to manage your tab addiction?

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(via Ghacks)

WWD Screencast: Flowr

Simon Mackie — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:00:35 +0000

I’ve been playing with Flowr over the past couple of days. It’s a collaboration web app that’s a little like having a private Facebook for your company or team, enabling you to share status updates, files, events, discussions and more. I thought I’d record a short screencast to give you an overview of how it works:

Flowr is available in two flavors. There’s a free version that has basic features, two groups and 1 Gb of storage. The premium version offers unlimited groups and 10 Gb of storage — it’s free until September 30th, when it will cost $5 per user per month.

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

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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Screencasting: My Setup and Some Tips

Simon Mackie — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:00:09 +0000

A few readers have emailed me commenting on the clarity of our screencasts and asking about the software that I use, so I thought I’d outline my setup and provide some hints and tips for producing easy-to-understand screencasts.

Equipment

13-inch MacBook Pro
External monitor

A microphone or headset is a must if your environment is noisy. I’d love to get a nice mic, like the sE2200T, but I can’t justify the expense for occasional screencasting. I find that the MacBook’s built-in mic is generally good enough for screencasts, as long as there’s no background noise.

Software

Camtasia for Mac (Camtasia’s built-in editing capabilities mean that I don’t need a separate editing program)
Ooyala Backlot (for uploading to, and managing videos on, Ooyala, our video host. Please see disclosure at bottom.)

In the past I’ve used Jing Pro and iMovie, which also gives pretty good results, although the combo doesn’t have the functionality that Camtasia provides. For Windows screencasts, I use Jing Pro on my XP laptop and then edit the movies in iMovie on my Mac.

Hints ‘n’ Tips

I prepare for each screencast by making sure I know exactly what it is I want to cover beforehand. I don’t write out a full script — I find the screencast ends up being too stilted, plus it’s hard to keep your place while interacting with the app — but rather a list of features to cover and important points to make. I just write them out in big block letters on a notepad next to my computer so that it’s easy to glance over and see what I need to do next.

I generally record a bunch of takes until I get one I’m happy with; sometimes it might take 10 or so false starts before I get one that’s satisfactory. While Camtasia has decent editing functionality, I find that it’s best to try and record the screencast in one take as it makes them seem more natural and flow better. I try to keep my screencasts — especially those that are just quick tours of a web app — to around five minutes or less to avoid boring the viewer, so recording in one take usually isn’t that hard. If I were to record a longer screencast I’d probably have to break it up into sections, record them separately and edit them together.

Good sound quality is critical in order for viewers to be able to understand what you’re saying. Fortunately, my office has reasonable acoustics and is at the back of my house so it’s generally pretty quiet. However, I often find that just as I’m about to get to the end of a good take, a police car with sirens blazing will drive past, a helicopter will fly overhead or the phone will ring. In those situations, there’s not much I can do apart from redoing the take. I’ve tried re-recording just the section affected by the noise, but often the transition between the two takes is too great and it ends up being distracting. I also try to keep my voice enthusiastic and upbeat — it’s easy to sound tired after the first few takes, and you can bet that if you sound bored, your viewer is going to be bored, too! If I find on playback that my voice sounds monotonous, I’ll redo the take.

It’s virtually impossible for me to get a take that’s flawless; I always make little mistakes. But the viewer isn’t expecting perfection, and will probably be more forgiving of your mistakes than you are — they might not even notice them. (Note: This is not the case if you’re making a demo video to be used on a product site. In that instance, I’d keep redoing it until I’d eliminated every “um” and “ahh”).

In editing, it’s tempting to use the fancy transitions that Camtasia and other programs provide, but I often find them more distracting than useful. I also steer clear of highlighting effects (like the effect that Camtasia provides to zoom in on an area of interest on the screen) for the same reason, unless it’s absolutely necessary. I mainly just make sure that the sound is OK, add bumpers and titles as necessary and edit out any distracting pauses.

The final piece of the puzzle is hosting. It’s important to use a video host with a transcoder that won’t compress the video too much so that when viewers play it back they can still clearly see what’s going on. We currently use Ooyala, which has great quality, although previously we also used Vimeo, which I was also very happy with. I’ve tried YouTube in the past but I found that its quality wasn’t great for screencasts; that may not be the case now as it allows for HD video.

Disclosure: Ooyala has a commercial video hosting relationship with the GigaOM Network.

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Photo courtesy stock.xchng user kpeterson

WWD Screencast: Cohuman, Collaborative Task Management

Simon Mackie — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:00:42 +0000

Cohuman is a task management app that makes it easy to share and assign tasks with other people. I made a screencast to show you how it works:

Cohuman is still in beta and as such, has some rough edges. I found a few things in the interface that didn’t work quite as smoothly as I would have liked — for example, it took me a little while to figure out that I couldn’t change the name of a project just by clicking on it. However, if you’re looking for a fairly straightforward task management app that can assign and manage tasks across a few different people, it’s worth trying out — and it’s free.

What do you think of Cohuman?

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Camtasia for Mac: A Full-featured Screencasting Solution

Simon Mackie — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:00:14 +0000

Most of WebWorkerDaily’s screencasts are recorded using Techsmith’s Jing Pro screen-recording software, an easy-to-use, low-cost solution that we’ve also written about. Techsmith recently released new versions of Camtasia, its more full-featured screencast recording and editing suite for PCs and Macs. I was fortunate enough to be offered the chance to try out Camtasia for Mac 1.1, so I’ve been putting it through its paces over the past couple of days.

Like Jing, Camtasia is a tool for recording your screen (or just a portion of it) together with a voiceover, and optionally, input from a camera, such as a webcam. That’s where the similarities end, though — with Camtasia, once you’ve finished recording, you’re taken to an editing suite where you can turn your recording into a polished movie. Add transitions and fades to your recording, splice in additional video, record a new voiceover, overlay text, edit the audio — there are plenty of robust tools available for creating a truly professional-looking piece. There are some really useful “smart” features available, too. Perhaps most useful is the SmartFocus, which automatically zooms into the portion of the screen where the action is taking pace (perhaps you’re clicking a button, or filling out a form). Adding effects and transitions to the movie is a simple matter of dragging and dropping them onto the timeline. You can also overlay text and shapes, and reposition elements like the webcam shot, just by dragging them on the canvas.

Editing in Camtasia is fairly straightforward, although if you haven’t done any video editing before if may take a little getting used to. However, I think that if you’re doing any kind of serious screencasting work, it’s worth spending the time getting the hang of it. With Jing, if I make a mistake during recording or if there is something in the final version that I’m not completely happy with, I have to re-record the entire thing, while in Camtasia, I can fix little mistakes and just generally produce a much more polished end product with a little editing.

I made a short screencast in Camtasia to show you around the editing suite:

One additional significant difference between Jing and Camtasia is, of course, the cost. While Jing is free (the Pro version that I use costs $15 per year), Camtasia for Mac is currently on sale for $99 (it normally costs $149). A 30-day free trial is available, which I would recommend taking advantage of to see if the editing facilities available are worth the additional cost for you.

Let us know what you think of Camtasia for Mac in the comments.

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WWD Screencast: Spring Cleaning Your Mac With OnyX

Simon Mackie — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:00:56 +0000

If your Mac has been feeling a little sluggish of late, now would be a good time to do a little spring cleaning to get rid of some of the cruft that’s accumulated on your hard drive. One freeware utility that can help do that is Titanium Software’s OnyX; I made a quick screencast showing how it works:

What tools do you use for cleaning your Mac?

WWD Screencast: Picmeleo

Simon Mackie — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:00:41 +0000

While there are plenty of free online image editors available, what makes new offering Picmeleo stand out from the crowd is that it’s embeddable. It’s very simple to set up and offers your visitors an attractive, easy-to-use image editor built into your own site. I made a quick screencast to show you how it works:

Which online image editor do you use?

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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WWD Screencast: Cluster Tabs Firefox Add-on

Simon Mackie — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:00:56 +0000

I often end up with way too many tabs open at once, particularly when I’m researching a particular topic. To cut down on tab overload, I’m experimenting with a nifty Firefox add-on called Cluster Tabs. In conjunction with a web service, it lets you group tabs together into “clusters.” Once you’ve clustered your tabs, you can then share them with others through Twitter, email, IM, Facebook, etc., via a unique public URL. I recorded a quick screencast to show how it works:

WWD Screencast: Cluster Tabs from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

Cluster Tabs is easy to use, free (the cluster pages have some advertising), doesn’t require registration, and works with Firefox 3+.

Have you tried Cluster Tabs? Did it help you cut down on tab clutter?

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Fast, Easy Screencasts With Screenr

Thursday Bram — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:00:08 +0000

By relying on Twitter, new screencast tool Screenr has created a really simple option for recording and distributing short videos. Recording a screencast is as easy as logging in to your Twitter account and pressing the record button. From there, you can easily post the link of your video. There are no downloads, uploads or even fees to slow down the process.

Once you’ve started a recording, you can move and resize the active recording area like any other window. You can also choose an audio input source to record sound if you don’t want to use the microphone Screenr automatically detects on your computer. Once you’ve finished recording your screencast, Screenr will automatically queue up the video so that you can watch it and make sure that it’s satisfactory. You can also add up to 117 characters of written description to your video — 140 characters less those necessary to add a link to your video when your description is posted to Twitter. You do have the alternative of stopping the automatic tweet Screenr sends out, as well as the option of deleting a video before it becomes accessible to anyone who wants to look.

All of Screenr’s videos are public, allowing you to browse through those that other people have already posted. You can re-tweet or reply to a video as well as share it as a link or embed it on another site. Many of the videos currently up are simply examples of users test-driving the application, but there are quite a few quick tutorials posted, along with fast reviews of other services. You can get a feed of new videos as well as check out popular screencasts already up on the site.

Given Screenr’s integration with Twitter, it’s no surprise that the team behind the web application is quick to help anyone who tweets about a problem with it. I learned this through experience when I had a bit of trouble getting Screenr to work with my system. The issue turned out to be on my end, but Screenr’s staff was quick to respond. The site also offers a brief help page, as well as support through GetSatisfaction.

Screenr seems to be an ideal fit if you just need to create a quick video and get it online — perhaps quickly showing a team member how to do something online or provide a little customer service that your Twitter followers can view immediately. But Screenr may not fit the bill if you’re looking for something a little more robust. Screenr limits videos to five minutes and there’s no way to edit your videos. I don’t think that the typical Screenr user will have a problem with that, but it will limit who winds up using Screenr on a regular basis. The logistics of depending on Twitter could also create some difficulties, given Twitter’s ongoing stability issues.

Overall, Screenr is a fast tool: its biggest benefit is that you can get a screencast recorded and distributed in less than 10 minutes. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all recording tool, but it doesn’t need to be.

What screencasting tool do you use?

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