Demo Girl

ScreenToaster is a free screencasting application that can help anyone create simple screencast demonstrations.  There’s nothing to download and it’s so easy to use that you’ll be creating screencasts in minutes.

After a quick sign up you can immediately start creating screencasts.  Just click on “start recording” and your off!  Ok, so one downside is that the ScreenToaster page needs to stay open somewhere in your browser while you’re recording but you can select portions of your screen to record and easily cut out the ScreenToaster tab.  When you’re all through you can add captions and record audio to go along with your video.  Your videos can be kept private or made public to be viewed by others in the ScreenToaster community.  You can also link to your video, like mine here, and get the embed code.

When I first came across ScreenToaster I was a bit worried that because it is so easy to use, I would actually lose business because people would start creating their own screencasts instead of hiring me.  After trying it out though, I realized that while it does make nice screencasts, you can’t edit, use transitions and other effects, or clean up the audio like you can with the software I use.  I’ve decided that ScreenToaster may actually help me when it comes to doing professional screencasts.  I can have my clients send over a “rough” demo using ScreenToaster showing what they would like me to cover in my professional screencast.  It could be a much more efficient tool than screenshots and storyboards.  The learning curve is so small that I can’t imagine anyone having a problem using it.  Unfortunately, ScreenToaster is in private beta right now so if you want to see how it works, check out my screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 2m34s

[via TechCrunch]

Memiary gives you a place to quickly take note of things you’ve done throughout the day, but may not necessarily remember in a day or two.  Basically, it’s like a diary for your memory – hence the name, Memiary.

The entire process, from start to finish, is ridiculously easy.  Choose a username, a password, and jot down five things you’ve done today.  These should be things that you may want to remember later, but which may not be important enough to warrant an entire blog post.  You can post up to five activities or thoughts on any day.

You can go back and view posts from previous days, weeks, months, and years.  You can also go back and edit any of your entries.

The feature list isn’t huge for Memiary, but they just launched so check out the blog for updates.  I’d also like to say thank you to Memiary for posting the proper pronunciation of their application.  It’s spelled funky but it’s pronounced just like the word “memory”.  More companies should take note and ALWAYS explain how to properly say the name of their service, if it’s not obvious.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve mispronounced something in a screencast and then had to explain to the owner of the site, “well, maybe that’ll teach you to pick a better name or at least to tell people what the heck it means”.  To see Memiary in action, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 1m47s

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Storytlr gives you a fast and easy way to create a microblog to share posts from sites like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.  You can then create stories to share, using certain content, during specific periods of time.

Getting started is really easy.  The username that you choose will be the URL of your storytlr page.  You can see mine here.  If you have your own domain, you can use that as well.  After you sign up, just enter in the user names for the social networking sites that you use.  Currently, the only supported sites are Delicious, Flickr, Google Reader, Lastfm, Picasa, Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube, and Digg.  Storytlr will then grab everything you’ve posted to these sites and organize them by date on your storytlr page.  Everything you’ve done on these sites will be listed on each day you posted and can be searched through and filtered by month.  Visitors can also comment on each post and you can make items private or public with one click.  You can customize the way your page looks and even choose different widgets to add to the sidebar.

Now comes the storytelling aspect of storytlr.  Next to the lifestream tab on your page, you’ll see a tab that says stories.  This is where you can share items you’ve posted to various sites, in more of a storyboard layout.  Just give your story a name, like “My Summer Vacation”, and then enter in the dates you want included in your story.  Next, choose the sites you want content pulled from, like Flickr and YouTube.  Storytlr will create a story out of everything you posted to those sites during those dates.  You can choose to make these public or private and choose to make certain items private as well.

If that wasn’t enough, storytlr also allows you to post status updates, write entire blog posts, share links, photos, and even mp3s, right from your account.  To learn more about storytlr, check out the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 4m6s

[via ReadWriteWeb]