I started using Pinterest about a year and a half ago when I was planning my wedding.  I created some boards with different hairstyles, bouquets and centerpieces.  My plan was to share these with my sister so that she could add things and so on.  But I didn’t know how to do that so I ended up just using it for my own reference.   Actually, I didn’t put much time into figuring out how to collaborate.  And I’m thinking that maybe this could be playing a minor roll in the confusion some people are having.  I mean, sure, it’s fun to just start pinning every beautiful picture of a sunset or expensive handbag, but the real value in Pinterest is the social and collaborative aspect.  At least that’s my take on it.

Pinterest is a great place to find and share inspiration for just about anything – you just need to know how to look for it.  And how to organize it.  And what not to pin   Hopefully my screencast will showcase some of the coolness that Pinterest has to offer.

It made me wonder if it was either too confusing or just didn’t make sense.  Because it didn’t make sense to me until I read up on it and then took the time to actually edit my Timeline and put important events that I wanted to share, front and center.

Along with my wondering came, of course, the need to create a screencast to share a few easy ways to make Timeline a fun aspect of Facebook.

Anyway, what I had not done was something that I believe to be a huge mistake.  I didn’t have a Facebook page for DemoGirl.  What? I know. Dumb.

DemoGirl puts food on the table, introduces me to awesome new people and recently, turned me into a celebrity judge!

So if you have a moment, and you really mean it, please like DemoGirl on Facebook.  I have years and years to make up for.  Another reason I should be exceptionally disgusted with myself?  I recently stumbled across an old screencast tutorial I made on just this very subject.

I’ve been running a Quickcast special for quite a while now, and it’s almost time to say goodbye.  I thought it would be a great way to find new customers and to give businesses a less expensive option for a screencast that only needed to cover one specific feature.  It did both of those things, but unfortunately, it also connected me with people who didn’t realize that my time is just as valuable as everyone else who is trying to run a business. And I am running a business. 

No worries though! The Quickcast was always intended to be just that, a special, and it will be around until mid-January and I’m sure it will be back again – think of it as the McRib of screencast specials…

As some of you may know, I started screencasting in blog form in 2006 – meaning I would find cool Web apps and create screencasts in place of blog posts to show them off. This “idea” of screencasting anything and everything I found and blogging about it was the brain-child of my two older brothers, who were actually paying me to do this. Seriously. They wanted me to screencast my butt off so that when it started to catch on (only took about 3 years…) I would already be ahead of the game and we could get right into becoming a professional screencasting business. After about a year of learning the best way to capture the very best assets of a Web app, and in a short amount of time, I got my first paying gig. Not so long after I did work for these guys, they were bought by Google and became the foundation of a little service known as Google Voice. I will forever be indebted to the team-formally-known-as-GrandCentral for giving me tips about how to work with clients and how to make a better screencast. They are what I would call “dream clients”.  I hope the screencast I did for them never, ever makes an appearance.  Remember, this was the beginning and I was still learning to fly.

Now I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m not leaving the screencasting business any time soon. This is not a goodbye to screencasting post. It is, however, a goodbye and a thank you to Centercloud, the company that paid me to screencast for so many years. Centercloud is owned by my brother, completely family run, and is primarily a software development company. They’ve been in business since I was in diapers and continue to rock. But we realized that DemoGirl was becoming more and more of my thing and not really a way to sustain an entire company. Our pricing model was aimed at start-ups who had little cash (not too little ) and needed a great video to get their product noticed. While their dream of starting a custom screencast company really did succeed, they decided to let it go. Thankfully, they let it go to me! So, thanks to Tom, Joe and Mo. You guys were great to work with and I’ll see you at Christmas.

And if you, my dear readers, are looking for drama and back stabbing, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Family comes first and this was a very friendly split.

So that’s the latest from the DemoGirl newsroom. In other news, I’m still busy making screencasts and I have a killer special going on now.

Thanks for sticking with me over the years. I’m not going anywhere. Unless it’s a tropical island…

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A little while back YouTube announced that it is giving users the chance to make some simple edits to ABU (Already Been Uploaded) videos. No, you can’t make major edits, but you can trim time off the front or back end of your video. You can also rotate, stabalize, play with color and add effects or audio. My kids dig the effects they can quickly add to their Lego and zombie movies.

To check out some of the simple things you can do to your YouTube videos, watch the
screencast below:

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create app tabs and edit existing app tabs for your mobile app.