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Demo Girl

Screenshots Suck!

Free Screencast Application, ScreenToaster, May Be My New Best FriendNovember 13

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

Memiary - A Note Taking Tool For Your BrainNovember 6

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 Memia

Storytlr Creates Stories Out Of Your Online ActivityNovember 3

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.

Create Flow Guides For Your Users With ProductPlannerOctober 30

ProductPlanner gives anyone with a Web service the ability to create easy to follow flow guides demonstrating anything from how to sign up for an account to how to invite friends to a service.

You start off by naming the flow, such as, “How to sign up for a Twitter account”.  Then you can add other titles such as the product name and what type of site it’s for.  Next add the steps that you want to show your user in the flow.  There is a list of pre-defined steps and you can fully customize them with your own titles and images from your own site.  I want to point out that I did find it difficult to figure out just how to customize a flow step, so that may be something they want to make more apparent.

You can choose to share your flows with a URL, which can be password protected, and get the embed code so you can use it on your site.  You can also comment on public flows listed in the gallery and save them to your favorites.  If you have a

Update For DemoGirl Readers: I’m Still Here!October 27

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I just wanted to give you a brief update to let you know what I’ve been doing and what the future holds for DemoGirl.

As you may have noticed, there aren’t any ads on DemoGirl (can’t promise that won’t change) and we don’t charge for the screencasts that I create and post here.  The way we monetize DemoGirl is by creating custom screencasts for various Web companies.  On the custom side of things, it’s been a very good month!  Unfortunately, that also means a not-so-good month for posting to DemoGirl.  I would love to live in a world where making money was just a perk and not a necessity, but it just doesn’t work that way.  The great thing is that I still get to do something I love, but it takes away from doing another thing I love - creating screencasts for this site.

With that said, I’m finally getting all caught up and should have some new content for you soon.  Thank you to everyone who is still sending me sites to screencast, keep ‘em coming.  Also, if you create screencasts, I would love to share them here.  I can’t compensate you financially but I have a pretty great bunch of readers that would love to see your stuff.  Drop me a note at molly at vpop dot net.