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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Adobe Buzzword Beta

Recently i looked at Microsoft SkyDrive as online storage mechanism and actively use Google Docs to hold a lot of my documents. Adobe is coming out with a similar offering in terms of online document storage and collaboration.

Main Features

• Its an online word processor
• It allows you to store and access your documents from anywhere (internet access permitting)
• Its got an excellent collaboration functionality – allows multiple authors to make changes to the same document
• Key to any collaboration tool is tracking changes, versioning and reviewing edits. It comes with an tools to do all these things.
• Ability to add comments to the document inline as well as controlling access to documents/functions through roles.
• It supports image imbedding and formatting words around these images.

Right.. so lets take this for a quick test drive…

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Windows Live SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

One of the more popular online storage providers out there currently is Google with their GoogleDocs application. This is a pretty cool application that allows you to upload and share all manner of documents.

Microsoft has done it one better with their latest offering called Microsoft Skydrive. Similar in concept, it’s one of the services provided by Windows Live that gives you your very own online drive where you can store just about anything.

More impressively, the space you are allowed to store is a mind boggling 25gigs! Thats a whole lot of space :)

So what would you store in these 25 gigs? Here is an idea.. practically everyone out there now has a digital camera of their own (my four year old has her very own.. in pink). And how many people out there keep back ups of their photos? I bet a lot of folks out there have no back up strategy and dump all their photos on their local hard drive only to lose it in the next boom-event (ie, virus, hard drive failure, accidentally formatting your hard drive while trying to install Linux on a separate drive – yeah.. that happens too ;) ).

So how do you get access to this free space and use it as an alternative to Google Docs and other sharing systems (such as Picasa and/or Flickr, etc)?

Right.. lets start shall we? 

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Small Basic Introduction

I stumbled across Small Basic on DevLabs. And its catch phrase caught my attention: “Small Basic is a project that’s aimed at bringing ‘fun’ back to programming.” I wasn’t a believer at first, and I simply had to try it.

It turns out that its simplicity is captivating. Sure the functionality is limited, but it was simple enough that almost anybody can use it. Start coding, then click Run, and you get instant results. I think this is the perfect tool to get somebody to be interested in programming. One of our colleagues was looking for something to get his kid started in programming, and there is no need for him to look further :)

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