ScreenToaster – Online Screen Recorder

In the last post we test drove an application called Cropper that takes static screen shots of your desktop (full screen or partial). This time we’ll extend it a bit further and look at ways to record screens to produce screencasts. I’m sure all of you have gone to sites such as youtube and seen lots of "how to" videos that had recordings of someones desktop as they walk you through some operation with a monotone voice in the back dictating what they are doing…

Well in this case, we’ll have a look at an application that allows us to create such videos. Now, I’m NOT going to do the monotone voice thing.. however, I will endeavor to get some form of recording going to show you how its done.

The application is called ScreenToaster and it meets my criteria of being free and functional! ScreenToaster is a web-based screen recorder designed to capture your screencasts, do some minimal post-recording activities (such as adding sub-titles, audio etc) and then either stream them directly from their site or download as a video file.

So lets start shall we?

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Cropper – Capture your Screens easily!

There are many applications out there that can capture all or part of your screens. The more notable ones include SnagIt and via Microsoft Office One Note. Unfortunately most of these cost to use. Cropper has been around for a while now and is one of the best free screen capture applications out there.

Written by Brian Scott and available for both Windows 32bit and 64bit operating system, it offers an easy, intuitive and configurable means to capture ones desktop.

Lets go through its main features first before we take it for a test drive….

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Newb Tech’s purpose

I’ve been thinking.. This blog was initially created as a personal blog to hold my thoughts and views on practically anything. So I wanted an online diary of sorts. However, when i started setting up everything, a clear purpose behind this site suddenly eluded me.. and i started going in all sorts of tangents..

I saw that the majority of the blogs out there served two purposes: 1. a personal blog that was hardly visited apart from family and friends, and 2. a resource blog that specialized in one or more areas and over time grew to have a wider audience.

Also, i noticed resource blogs coming in many flavors. A lot of resource sites out there are simply portals that spin out dozens of posts every week with links to everything to do with their subject. This is "good" in some ways, but the articles are not really written by the site owners.. they are simply pointers to other peoples work.

Then you get the great tutorial sites that pick a product such as Photoshop and go hard out in teaching its audience on how to best use that product.

I didn’t (and still don’t know) the purpose behind my blog.. Ideally I want this site to be a place where people can come and see my experiences with test driving new applications or technology. This doesn’t mean that I need to be an expert at these applications. Rather its more of a casual look and more than just providing a blurb and link. Certainly a product may take more than one article to cover off and we want to start doing that as our knowledge of that product grows.

I want a wide set of audience and LOTS of comments :). I don’t want this to be a portal site as such (y’know… the articles that begin with "25 ways to do something" and end up with 25 links to other sites).

So, if there are any products out there that you want us to test drive and play around with and give our thoughts on, please let me know via email or leave a comment here. Our next applications will be the Zoho suite of online applications and ScreenToaster (a great little tool everyone can use to "Record" their desktop and create mini movies)..

Till then.. thanks for reading my ramblings and leave a frickin’ comment!