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.

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.

Once your flash drive is created, you simply plug it into the USB port on the back of your Apple TV and reboot. The installation takes a few minutes. Then you reboot the Apple TV again.

One of the many things that are installed is Boxee. As their site says: “on a laptop or connected to an HDTV, boxee gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from services like Netflix, MTV, Pandora and flickr.”

I highly recommend this hack and Boxee.

On some level, it makes perfect sense. In our multi-tasking, multi-communication world, the pace continues to quicken. Why wade through several multi-paragraphed blog posts each day when you can get the gist of the matter with a brief 140-character-or-less tweet? And better yet, you don’t even have to be at your computer to get them.

The new blogging is micro-blogging, Twitter style.

I’ve had many family and friends ask me about how to use Twitter. So, putting the interesting social and anthropological discussions aside for now, I will share the tools that I currently use to broadcast and receive the millions of tweets in the Twittersphere.

Twitterific
If you want a great, lightweight app that helps conserve screen real estate, you may like Twitterific. The interface is simple, easy to use, and lets you both read and publish tweets.

Twitterific Interface

Twitterific also has an iPhone/iTouch app that gives you essentially the same interface. Twitterific has both free and paid versions for the Mac and iPhone/iTouch apps ($14.95 and $9.99 respectively).

TweetDeck
Twitterific is great for simply reading and publishing tweets, but it doesn’t do much in the way of filtering or organizing your Twitter world. For that, I use TweetDeck, which runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms.

TweetDeck’s strength is in it’s ability to filter, organize, read and publish tweets and manage FaceBook contacts all in one application. And, it’s free!

TweeDeck interface

Twittelator
Right now, my favorite iPhone/iTouch Twitter app is Twittelator. It cost $3.99 at the iTunes App Store.

This app packs a lot of features into a simple, easy-to-use app.

Twittelator interface

Twittelator landscape

Twittelator lets you easily send pictures, show your current geo-location, add 100s of dingbats to your message, and much more. The landscape option for publishing new tweets is especially nice.

Twitter Related Sites
There are a number of very interesting sites related to the world of Twitter.

TwitterFall
One of my favorites is called TwitterFall. TwitterFall lets you filter the tweets of the world according to your predefined keywords. In the left bar, you can define keywords that show up in tweets around the world. Then, TwitterFall begins streaming those tweets as they come in (they fall, one on top of the next; hence TwitterFall). Some of the more popular keywords come fast and furious, so TwitterFall allows you to control the rate at which they fall onto the main page.

In this example, I’ve set the keyword to “Mac” and the speed to a .5 second interval between each tweet:

TwitterFall main page

TwitterFall is a great tool for getting a window into the kinds of activity occurring in the larger twittershpere.

Twitterholic
If you want to get a quick tally of the top 100 Twitter user based on number of followers, go to Twitterholic. You can even enter your own twitter account and see where you rank in the grand scheme.

TweetStats
If you’re interested in knowing how much and when you use Twitter, go to TweetStats and check your numbers.

These are a few of the Twitter related apps and sites that I use on a regular basis. But the Twitter world is evolving quickly, and there are likely to be new and innovative ways to extend Twitter and other twitter-like apps.

One relatively new and related idea is 12SecondsTV. It’s like Twitter, only with video. Check it out.

]]> http://www.macsage.com/dont-be-a-twit-tweet-well-with-these-tools/feed/ 1 http://www.macsage.com/dont-be-a-twit-tweet-well-with-these-tools/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MacSage/~3/rkDbh0WeDSk/ http://www.macsage.com/the-power-of-wordpress/#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:16:20 +0000 patrick http://www.mac-sage.com/?p=305

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!