Tag Archives: Software

Blurring sensitive data in Screencasts!

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Warning: Rant!

Screencasts have taken off in a big way recently and is one of the best ways to learn or explain “stuff” ( yeah, really technical wording there!). On the Mac side of things numerous tools are available for screencasting like iShowU, Screenflow, Camtasia (for the Mac), Screnium etc. You’ve got to wonder, if so many applications are coming up then screencasting must really be a big thing. Its actually the boom in podcasting that has brought about the explosion of screencasts and its become a norm to now provide not only screenshots of a new application but also a screencast video showing how your app works!Youtube has also been a major factor in this phenomena, you can find everything from Photoshop post-processing screencasts to really niche screencasting sites like Bioscreencast which specializes exclusively in screencasts related to bioinformatics.

I have been playing around with Google wave for some time now and wanted to make a screencast of a few tricks that I learnt along the way. The problem is that casual screencasters like me don’t have dedicated machines for just screencasting – so when I use my personal machine/account for the job I do not prefer to share my contacts to the world. I quickly thought that applications like Screenflow and Camtasia should have a feature to selectively blur content (in this case email addresses & profile images) on a screencast.

After about fumbling around for more than hour I realised the fact that almost none of the currently available screencasting applications on the Mac provide this feature. Camtasia from Techsmith which has been one of the most popular screencasting apps has this feature in the Windows version of their Camtasia suite but not on the Mac! Seriously, is this such a tough feature to implement in a screencasting app? I mean all the apps support screencasting at HD resolution! but do not feature an essential requirement like blurring sensitive data on a screencast..come on!

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Delibar – A Fabulous Delicious Bookmarks Client for the Mac

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Delicious has been my way of tackling Bookmarks and though I love the idea the tools available to execute are sometimes a pain. Since I needed frequent access to my bookmarks on my browser, the Delicious extension was a natural choice. Boy! that was such a big mistake!! the extension takes ages to load (considering my thousands of bookmarks) and infact slows down the whole browser considerably. Again if I’m on another browser say safari or Opera – then its more convoluted.

Finally I came across Delibar – A delicious client for the Mac. Delibar is so good that I wonder why the Delicious guys just buy this company and make it their default bookmark management tool. You can try my complete review here, but trust me this is definitely worth the buy if you’re a serious Delicious user.


Blogo – The Mars edit Alternative?

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I am fan of Mars Edit, because it simple and gets the job done perfectly.Too bad it costs a little more than what i can afford for a blogging client.I’ve been on the look out for an alternative to Marsedit for a while now and ended up with Blogo.To start out let me say – No blogo is not considerably cheaper than Mars edit, atleast for a student like me :-( But i am just throwing this post up to reflect my opinion of Blogo.

Blogo is one of those apps that just be looking at the screenshots you could fall in love with.

The best thing i like about Blogo other than its cool interface is its very soothing appeal and no nonsense get it done interface, which are all very typical to msot Cool Mac apps ;-) One should have no problems with the features, it does pretty much all that you can ask for, like allows adding images and resizing them for your blog posts, integration with most popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger etc.There are some well thought of features like word,character count – which one wouldn’t need in the case of a blog but its just there if you need it.There’s a full screen editing option that gives sort of Write Room experience which i love – undistracted blogging perfect!

somethings that i miss, or rather am getting used to doing differently are

  1. Categories: categories are provided as sort of tags.
  2. Spellcheck missing…Ooops! isn’t that a blaring omission..i mean typos do “happn” dont they?
  3. Considering that Marsedit is such a strong competition, i would expect blogo to be priced more competetively.

Blogo has a lot of potential to knockout Marsedit, especially with that awesome interface that’s hard to resist.I am sure that the disadvantages that I’ve listed above are pretty minor (expect the spellcheck, if i may say so) which would probably be fixed in their next version.I’ll add this to my “probably might buy” list of software.

PS: This post was created with Blogo.

 

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