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.