Go with the Screenflow

It's not often that I'll buy something based on an email advertisement. But I was intrigued when the Flip4Mac people sent me one announcing three new products for sale, all resulting from a recent acquisition they made. (Flip4Mac is the company that makes the free plug-in for Macs to let them play Windows Media Files, among other products).

Anyways, their write-up of newly-acquired ScreenFlow really caught my eye, so I downloaded the demo. It's a screencasting program, and it's quite awesome.



A screencast, for the uninitiated, is a recording of your desktop activity, with voiceovers and possibly other graphics. It's like pointing a video camera at your screen while you demonstrate how to do something, but of course the quality is much better. You see the mouse move, hear the mouse clicks, watch windows open and close - all while the narrator explains what's happening. The training movies at Lynda.com are examples of screencasts.

Within half an hour, I recorded a 5 minute screencast by simply plugging-in a microphone, launching Outlook, and hitting "record" in the ScreenFlow program. (yes, I know - Outlook is a Windows program. I was running it on my Mac via VMWare Fusion).

It was very, very easy to use; I only had to refer to the manual once. The timeline area is a cross between iMovie and Final Cut. It's a piece of cake to drop in additional graphics, background music, or even a second video source. Just drag and drop. You can also apply call-outs to specific areas, sort of like shining a flashlight onto a particular part of the screen to highlight a menu option, button, etc.



No wonder it won "Best Mac OS X Leopard Application" at this year's Apple World Wide Developer's Conference. I know I'll be making heavy use of this app at my company, putting together a nice library of training videos for our intranet.

New Browser on the Scene

As if there weren't already enough Web browsers to choose from - and as if Google didn't already have its paws wrapped tightly around our computing lives...along comes Google with its very own new Web browser, Google Chrome.

Of course, the tin-foil hat types are already going on and on about how this new browser, in its first beta release, is in truth an insidious effort to wreck everybody's privacy and show you more ads. After all, if Google can not only keep a history of your search habits, but also control the browser you use to interface with the Web, doesn't that give them an inordinate amount of power over your privacy and personal life? One example I heard was "What would a health insurance company pay, secretly or otherwise, to know that your last sit-down in front of Google included searches on "cancer diagnosis," "hospice care," "writing a will," and "terminal illness" ? The other question that comes up is: Will Chrome support ad-blocking plug-ins, considering that Google's business is serving up ads in the first places?

All those issues aside, what about Chrome as a piece of software? Well, it's early yet, but from what I've been able to glean from limited testing, it's very fast. The installer is lightweight, making for a quick download. Chrome launches quickly, and it loads pages in a VERY sporty manner. Now, it's hard to say how much of this speediness is because there aren't plug-ins loaded (yet). And it's a "virgin" install. A lot of software seems fast at first, only to bog down over time.

Its interface manages to be clean and simple, yet this browser offers most of the major features you've come to expect from a browser, such as tabbed browsing. Its full screen mode is nice. I read somewhere that Chrome will support running Web applications (a fancy term for "web pages that perform some function versus just providing reading material - a mortgage calculator tool, for example) in a browserless environment. Meaning, web apps will run in their own windows like standalone programs, not Web pages with all the web browser buttons and so forth.

It also has excellent, searchable history tracking. For those who forget to make bookmarks when they find something worth remembering on the Web, this should help. And I really like how the opening screen shows you large, full-color thumbnails of your most-visited Web pages. And, of course, the address bar can take either a web address or - surprise - keywords for a Google search.



Incognito is another major feature, which lets you browse in a "privacy" mode that does NOT keep track of what you've searched for or where you've been. Some have jokingly referred to this feature in Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser as "porn mode." Finally, it does some sort of auto-complete guessing when you start to type a URL, but I'm not sure what that's about just yet.

Of course, reviewers in the computing industry are all over the place. Some say this signals the beginning of the end for Google, others say it's a brilliant stroke. Either way, it'll be fun to play with and interesting to watch what happens. I feel bad for Web developers, though, who now have yet another browser to test against.

Mac users will have to hold out a little longer; at the moment, Google Chrome is only available for Windows XP and Vista.

More info:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080902-hands-on-with-chrome-googles-browser-shines-mostly.html

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9878

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_chrome