If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth a thousand pictures.
OK, I made that last part up. But you get the idea. When it comes to creating rich learning materials, a well done video can often make a concept or procedure very clear.
Until a few weeks ago, the offerings for Mac screencasting software were sparse. While Snapz-Pro and ScreenFlow did allow you to capture screen movement on your Mac, they were limited in their ability to edit.
Now, TechSmith has released its Camtasia product for the Mac. Camtasia allows you to capture screen movement and voice, and then bring these captures into a relatively robust editing environment to create cuts, transitions, callouts, titles, and more.
Camtasia's clean editing interface.
The interface is reminiscent of iMovie, with it’s simple and friendly look and feel. The video and audio editing is done on a timeline at the bottom of the interface. The play window is in the upper right. The media storage, transitions and filters are located in the upper left.
The selection of transitions, filters and actions are in the upper left.
If you’ve done any work in iMovie or FinalCut, Camtasia should be easy to get up and rolling within an hour.
One of the greatest strengths of Camtasia over most of the competition (including Adobe’s Captivate on Windows) is the vast selection of output formats.
Quickly share with iTunes, ScreenCast, and YouTube.
The Advanced Export option lets you export into a wide variety of output formats, including various flavors of QuickTime formats, with full control over output parameters via the Options button.
The large selection of export options.
Given the prevalence of video enabled mobile devices, I’m especially pleased to be able to output to the .m4v format for playback on iPod/iPhone devices.
This is version 1.0 of Camtasia for the Mac, so TechSmith will likely be fine tuning and adding features as this software matures. One thing I’d like to see is built-in captioning. But for now, you can’t beat this feature-set and the $99 debut price.
See more information about Camtasia for Mac.
Here kitty, kitty...
It’s been 4 days now with the new cat… so far, so good.
Right off, there’s a noticeable performance boost in startup, shutdown and general Finder tasks. That, along with the 7GB reclamation of disk space makes Snow Leopard worth the price.
The new QuickTime is slick, but lacks the export features of the previous version of QuickTime Pro. Thankfully, Apple anticipated this disappointment, and put the old QuickTime in the Utilities Folder in Applications.
Some folks will undoubtedly be using older applications which require Rosetta to run. Again, Apple found an elegant solution for those who chose not to initially install Rosetta. When starting an older application, a dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to install Rosetta. If yes, then your system connects to an Apple server, downloads and installs Rosetta, and launches your application. Pretty close to hassle-free.
There are still a few software developers racing to make their applications play nicely with Snow Leopard, but most of the major developers are already on board.
The Snow Leopard upgrade is highly recommended.
I’ve written several post here on how to hack your Apple TV to allow FTP access and open up a wide range of useful and fun apps. Back then, the process was more complicated and involved several steps. But things have changed.
There is now a very easy way to hack your Apple TV and not only allow FTP access, but also give you the ability to watch TV from Hulu. This is quite cool.
The first thing you do is download atvusb-creator from this site: http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/ The instructions on this page are simple and easy. This software will create all the necessary installation files onto a 1GB or larger USB flash drive.
I’m weeks away from finishing my first eBook!
I haven’t yet decided on the title. They (the expert eBook marketing folks) tell me that much thought should go into the title. There are two important reasons for that:
1. You want the title to be alluring and catchy to increase sales.
2. You want the title to accurately communicate what the reader can expect to find inside.
I’ve put several months of work in creating this eBook. I think most small business folks who want to create and maintain their own websites in an easy way will find this eBook quite valuable.
It’s loaded with screenshots and graphics, because many folks are very visual in their learning mode. Once I’ve got this finished, I will begin working on a companion video series that will work nicely with the eBook.
Stay tuned… we’re close!
