Tips and best practices for screencasts

The people from TechSmith (Camtasia, Jing, Snagit…) recently polled their community for best practices and tips for creating effective screencasts, software animations, screen demo’s, whatever you want to call them.
They bundled the result in a 3-page booklet, in a kind of “tag cloud” format. Quick to read, and very valuable!

You can download it from their blog.

User adoption has not changed since the Middle Ages

A lot of IT projects fail because users struggle with the change that the new tools bring them. As an IT implementer or trainer, it is good to “unlearn” everything you know about the software, and view it from a user perspective.

The video below shows that what is simple, is not always obvious!

A great software experience

As an IT professional, you meet a lot of people who are disappointed, sad, angry or even frustrated about the quality of the software they need to use every day. Maybe it is good to share a positive experience with software…

A friend was celebrating her birthday, and as always a lot of pictures were taken. But the next day, the 4 GB SD card contained… nothing!

image In an ultimate attempt to save the pictures (they had been there, because we previewed them at the party on the camera), I called google to the rescue, to find a program called CardRecovery. I must say I was rather sceptical.

On the website, you could download a free trial version, that allowed you to preview the images, but not to recover them. That’s already something, at least you only pay when it works.

I installed the program, attached the camera, let it run for about half an hour, and… it showed me the preview of the 500 lost pictures! Including a “Buy Now” button, of course.

I clicked the button, payed the price (29 €, very reasonable), entered the license key, clicked “Next” and it recovered the pictures. I did not even have to close the program.

So you see, lighten up! There is great software out there!