Aussie Geek Podcast #27 :: SAS Because ASS Was Not Cool
Yes this is a Sites Applications and Services episode. And in that order because we got in trouble off Cait for calling it an ASS episode… Personally I think she was the only one with her head in the gutter, KD and I were not thinking such impure thoughts 
That said here are the show notes! This episode took longer than expected to get out because my neck and upper back went west and I had a lot of trouble sitting and editing. Getting back on track now but not 100% yet - lets hope that’s not far away!
Also enjoy the video that we replaced Keith with, decided to embed it below.
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Show Notes
Welcome
Applications
- Camtasia: now available for Mac. Still on Sale for $99!
- Snarl: Notification software similar to the great Mac App “Growl”
- ManicTime: Track what you do, when, with what and for how long in graphic detail
- Live Edge: Create screen “hot-spots” to execute keyboard commands
Firefox Extension
- Long URL Please: Un-hide those shortened URL’s for added security
Sites and Services
- Personas: Interesting visual search for people
- BlindSearch: Search without branding and see what really works and what doesn’t
- twittermosaic: Create a mosaic of friends and or followers and then make swag
- card.ly: Online business card
- prezi: Forget PowerPoint and wake up your audience with this awesome presentation tool
- s4ve.as: Super simple 24 hour temporary file hosting, even your mum could use it
Feedback
Farewell
- Write us a review in iTunes
- Follow us on twitter
- Join the AGP Forum
- Remember the delicious tag is #aussiegeeks
Featured Music
Lillix
“Dance Alone” (mp3)
from “Dance Alone”
(Adagio Music Inc)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Napster
More On This Album
Regarding Camtasia; I’ve been using it at work for over a week and I can’t say that it is the “Rolls-Royce” of screen capture software. It is very similar to the Mac iMovie application. Camtasia will only run on Intel-based Macs (duo core 2 GHz or better suggested) running Leopard or better.
The Mac interface is different than the Windows interface (which isn’t unusual), and the Windows version allows you to crop your recording to a specific section of the screen or object, such as a browser window, before you start your capture whereas the Mac version will only capture the whole screen. This could be because we’re using the demo version of the application, but I’m not sure.
We also had to play around with the video compression settings in order to get a reasonable-looking output file–This took longer than it really should have. Camtasia does have presets to output to iTunes for iPod or iPhone, YouTube, and Screencast.com. I found that most of the output looked blurry at 640 by 480, and it took me quite a bit of fiddling until I could get something that looked decent.
I don’t know what sort of sound quality comes out as I wasn’t one of the people who were recording voiceovers. And I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t handle multi-track recordings. (I suggested we look into using Audacity for recording, but didn’t get a response.)
When it comes to screen capture, I like the program called Snapz Pro X by Ambrosia Software, but it doesn’t allow for editting unfortunately. It does capture static images rather well though, with a live preview where you can change the scale and several other options including colour depth and adding watermarks or copyright notices before you make the capture. And it captures very crisp video with optional microphone voiceover, and outputs to Quicktime movies. But again, it doesn’t allow for editting the final video, which is the disappointing part. You could import the video from Snapz Pro X into iMovie or Camtasia, but those applications recompress the video and make it blurry again.
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Max Headroom is all over YouTube… I remember watching the TV Show in the 80’s. I can’t remember where he got his start originally. A lot of “the kids” these days think Max is CGI, while he’s really just a guy wearing prosthetic makeup.
Regarding Card.ly … check out Poken (www.doyoupoken.com), a strange way of sharing your “vcard” in RL. Doesn’t do anything for me, but I signed up to reserve my name…
[What no bloopers?]
Hey, NO, I LIKE the “about the author” pix of Dave - handsome - I am NOT kidding! He looks like a university English professor!
@Brie I think he looks a bit constipated… ;P
So lets say you need to research attention tracking and distributing alerts to financial institutions in a multiplatorm environment.
Build the backend then let the public test your architecture.
Meet newsgator.
Their profits where not based on selling newsgator/netnewswire/feeddemon.
They tricked us all.
That vid is awesome. I’ll get round to listening to the podcast once I clear some space off my lappy. Almost bricked it yesterday recording a lecture.
I also found out today that Camtasia projects created on a Windows machine are NOT compatible with Camtasis projects create on a Mac. In other words, you can’t create a project in one OS and open it with the other OS. How whacked is that?
If you want to share files between OS’s, you have to render out a video file and then import it back into Camtasia… which sort of defeats the purpose of having the original file.
I also found out today that you can NOT create a Camtasia project file in Windows and open it with Camtasia on a Mac or vice versa. The files are not compatible. How crazy it that?
In order to share files between OS’s, you have to render out a video file and then import that file into Camtasia on the other OS. This kind’ve defeats the whole purpose of saving the original file! You get compression on compression and your videos look like crap.