As I am making these screencasts I am learning more about the power that is in this application. There will be more Screencasts to come to show you what can be done.

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In this podcast I am talking to two people from Telestream, the company that make ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is a super product that I use often to make screencasts. Barbara deHart and Christine Porter tell me all about ScreenFlow and also mention other products from Telestream.

I was able to give them direct a feature I would like to see in the ScreenFlow, they are keen to improve ScreenFlow and you never know my suggestion about being able to specify the placement of a clip within the screen might make it into ScreenFlow. It pretty good that they have snapping lines that let you snap a clip to the centres and to the edges but sometimes you might want a clip be at an exact position and for that you need some boxes where you can enter some numbers in the same way you can enter a number to specify the zoom level for example.

I also use VideoCue from Telestream and other people have requested some of the features in that to be merged into ScreenFlow, I agree with that for sure.

I know there are other screen capture applications out there and I have paid for a couple of them but in the end I had to get ScreenFlow because of what it can do with the editing. It really is handy to be able to do all you need to do in the one application, from capturing the whole of the screen to uploading it to YouTube.

See the Screencast I made about using ScreenFlow. I show some of the basics like adding extra media and using transitions in between clips. I will be producing more screencasts as soon as my cold/flu symptoms abate a little.

ScreenFlow

the best ScreenCapture Application

I use ScreenFlow and I am an affiliate for the application. I paid for the application initially but I was pleased to get on the Beta program to get version 2 upgrade without having to pay for the upgrade. I have tried other screen capture apps such as iShowU and SnapzPro, both of which I also paid for. It was the fault of Don McAllister that I lashed out more cash to get ScreenFlow when I already had to screen capture applications. When I met him at Podcamp Barcelona he gave me the recommendation. I tried it and decided that buying it was a no brainer for what I wanted to do. So you can trust me when I say that if you have not tried it yet then I would say give it a try. Once you have made a couple of Screencasts with it you will want to have it past the trial period too.

Here is screencast in which I show you the basics of ScreenFlow. How to put in video actions and callouts and set them up to work and look right. I will do some more screencasts featuring ScreenFlow soon. Why not hit the Leave a comment button below and say what you think yourself. Looking forward to hearing from you.

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Paul also known as iSherbet which is a hark back to childish memories of the sherbet fountain sweet you could get in days of old.

Maybe it is still possible to buy a sherbet fountain and I can treat myself when I am in Dublin next week. Paul is a karaoke type of DJ and encourages people to sing while drunk. At least he can put on the headphones and not be inflicted with the auditory pain of the pub singer. Honestly though, he says he enjoys doing it. Paul has a huge collection of songs which he manages on the Mac and uses an application called Kjams. Which is nothing to do with Jim Jams, or so I am told. Paul is even able to allow the karaoke singers use the iPhone to log in and chose the song they want to sing and get in a proper queue for belting out their tune, amazing I say.

Paul spent the whole of the interview talking on his iPhone, which was all right seeing as he was using the new Skype iPhone application to be interviewed and I have to say I was surprised that the audio was as good as it turned out to be. better than I have had with from some people with the Mac and a microphone.

He listens to loads of Geeky podcasts to be able to do some time travel on his way to work. Makes a commute shorter when you can be distracted by a podcast and some games like Touch Physics on the iPhone.

Last Friday there was a meeting of the Mac 20 Questions in the GoToMeeting and a great time was had by all. For me I was testing the system and was able to show a few things with the sharing of my screen. Quite impressive really. We will have the next meeting in the Mac20Q town hall on Friday the 17th of April. be there or be square. First 15 people in the room.

I recorded the audio from last week using WireTap Studio and it worked for me so this week I will try to have some question set up and record it with a view to making it a podcast.

Next Monday I will be in Dublin and have arranged to meet with the Mac Craic lads if they can get a evening pass from the boss. Looks like we will meet up in the  Aussie Bar in Parnell street. If there are people there I will perjhaps do some impromtu recording. Why not?

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I had some time to use and I wanted to do an interview for the Podcast and so I asked on Twitter if there was any Mac user ready to get started with an interview straight away. Up pops Joshua Rodriguez who is a student from Canada. We had a super chat about how he uses his Mac and maybe I was able to give him a tip or two as we were talking also.

One of the things I was wondering was, what do students in schools do regards taking computers into schools. Joshua wants a MacBook. They do cost quite a bit of money and you know what kids are like with other people’s property. Maybe with a computer you could expect a higher level of care, but it only takes a couple of mad minutes doing something silly and everyone says “It wasn’t me.” Maybe by bringing this up here I am showing my age and bringing out the dad of three lads part of me or the ex teacher part of my life.

Does anyone have any experience of how portable computers get looked after by school children? Let me know fill in the contact form below.

Seeing as he is a poor student, mind you – all students are that way, I remember it well, I suggested that he might use Mozy for his back ups. Like my son has no money to buy an extra hard drive to be able to use Time Machine or SuperDuper to make a back up, so what can be done is have all of the important files being backed up automatically with Mozy to the Cloud. 2 GB of free space is not to be sneezed at, for sure.

I have been using Mozy for about a month now and I am impressed. It just does the backing up I have set it to do and I forget about it. There is an icon on the bar at the top of the screen and if I click it I can see when the last back up happened and how many files and how much data was backed up to Mozy. It really is ttransparent in use.

The show sponsor for this episode as usual is ScreenFlow. Here is a page with more information. I use it a lot and it is impressive. Don McAllister of Screencastsonline was the person that told me about it when I met up with him in Barcelona last September.

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Click on the image to hear the podcast

Really pleased to get Don on the show. So many interviewees are recommending him and his Screencasts online and also I met him in the flesh as it were last September at Podcamp Barcelona. Don did a session at the Podcamp and I certainly found it interesting as he talked about the monetisation of his Podcast and how he was able to give up the day job. Now he has a job in which he works harder, probably but when you are doing something you want to do it is often not like work at all.

Don produces Screencasts showing how to use many of the Mac Applications and does a great job of it too. Steps by step guides to using an application in real world situations.

Don gets out and about as part of his Screencastsonline with MacMania tours, he is going to China later this year. He also gets to Macworld events in places like San Francisco. Obviously he is doing well with the service that he provides so that he can afford his Apple hardware and gadget addiction. As a member you get a brand new tutorial every week and extra member only shows. If you want to try it out then you can have a look at the free shows he makes available to the non members. Its a try before you buy thing, which is always good. The membership details you can find about about here. While you are on the Screencasts online site have a look at the free screencasts too. I was just watching one about how to geo tag your photos for iLife09. Excellent stuff !

Don has nearly 200 screencasts available and the good thing is that when you pay your six month membership you get access to all of the back issues too. That makes the deal to be great value.

Here is a list of the equipment that Don uses

Computer Equipment
ScreenCapture, Editing and Encoding – Apple MacPro (2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 10GB RAM)
Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P Card
Shuttle Pro 2

Storage
Internal – 4 x 500GB (2 x RAID 1 Partitions)
External – 2 x Fusion D500P with Multiplier Support (each with 5 x 750GB in RAID 0 config)
Various Firewire external drives

Audio Equipment
Heil PR-30 Microphone
dbx-266XL – Limiter/Compressor

Mackie Onyx 1220 Mixer
Edirol UA-1ex USB Interface

Software
Capture and Assembly Edit – Vara ScreenFlow
Final Edit – Final Cut Studio
Titling and Effects – Motion 3
Encoding – Compressor

As you can see Don has some good kit there. Maybe I will be able to get a MacPro one of the days with a pile of memory and hard disk thrown inside. You can find out about his work flow for making the screencasts on the blog he runs My Own Reality

Don is on a few other podcasts as a guest, including Mac Break Weekly with Leo Laporte and Andy Inatko. Mac Round table

Don also mentioned Mercury Mover, iBank. Logitech MX Revolution Mouse, Drobo, Jungle Disk, Plex, Boxee, The Automated home Podcast and Delicious Monster Podcast

Just visited the Pussycat club that is the British Mac podcast by Will Green. Not a lot of news in the period covered by the podcast so the content was thin in the Mac end of the wedge.
Nothing wrong with putting in other items to entertain though if there is a gap in the news.
Talking of News, Don McAllister thinks we are due for an announcement from Apple. I didn’t see what he thought might be coming in his posts from the Twitterverse.

Interviews

I will probably record an interview today, different in that it will be face to face with a local Mac user and a female. The lesser spotted female Mac user will be able to give me an idea if the Mac has a feminine side or not.
Dave Brown, from Australia, Paul Shadwell who lives in Switzerland, Alvaro Monoz-Aycuens from Madrid, Allison Sheridan in the USA and the MacMommy also USa have said that they will tell me their deepest darkest secrets about how they use the Mac on a daily basis.
Rob Hanson who recently was on the Nosillacast will be talking soon about how he helps people switch to the Mac from Windows.

So you can see that I have a busy time ahead over the next couple of weeks. I will need extra space on Libsyn for all of these podcasts.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about Mac 20 Questions, please re-tweet when you see that I have posted a new Podcast.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Wayne, otherwise known as Legion11. You can follow him by that name on Twitter. We had a good chat based on the Mac twenty questions. A family man and it was great to hear how his young son has taken to using the Mac like a duck takes to water. Wayne  is in the process of getting the rest of the family switched over to the Mac too.

Wayne has an ongoing project at the moment to learn about AppleScript, which is interesting because I think that AppleScript is an under used resource on the Mac, so I wish Wayne luck with that. I think that is going to be a well thumbed book you have there Wayne. Truely, a Geek in Training. We mentioned Bart Bushotts and his information he has made available about using Terminal while talking about geekyness.

Again my interviewee waxed lyrical about ScreencastsOnline so I have put that in as the sponsor for the show on this podcast. I think that much of the Mac community has already signed in blood to be a user of Don’s Screencastsonline but if you haven’t done that yet then please use the link in this post to check out ScreencastsOnline.

Wayne is still on his first Mac, a MacBook Pro he bought April 2007 which came with OSX Tiger, he changed to OSX Leopard as soon as it became available and he is planning to get a portable Mac when funds allow. Wayne and his son like movie making with iStopMotion from Boinx Software. They will spend a half a day to make a very short movie, so Wallace and Grommit watch out.

We talk about word processing software, including iWork, Open Office and Bean. Bean is interesting, as it is free and good. Wayne’s daughter is using Bean for her school work and is happy with what it does and how it works.

There is some chat about backing up, virus problems with Windows and some just general Windows bashing, just for fun you understand.

Today I am talking with Mark Dalton and I get some well thought out responses to the Mac 20 Questions. We had a great little chat about what it means to be a Mac User. One of Mark’s recommendations was for ScreencastsOnline from Don McAllister. You can get more details about Don’s screencasts here, a brilliant learning source for new and experienced users alike. Click the picture to the left or view the podcast at the bottom of the post.

Here is a little background about Mark from his web site. He has a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air, he is an iPhone user too.

I am employed by COLT Telecommunications as a Senior Manager within the Business Process & Systems function where I am responsible for a number of ITIL processes including, Incident, Problem, License, Change, and Configuration Management, as well as the outsourced European Desktop support contract for the 4500+ COLT users situated in the 13 COLT countries. Read more about COLT.

During my time with COLT Telecommunications I have held a number of externally and internally facing technical positions, and more recently spent 13 months in Gurgaon, India managing COLT’s 2nd level support team of 50+ engineers who provide 24×7 support to COLT’s critical systems. Prior to joining COLT Telecommunications I worked for Ask Jeeves, the Compaq Computer Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation also in a variety of technical roles.

Mark gave us some recommendations for software to use. Omnifocus, a Getting Things Done application. Myself I use Things as I mentioned in the podcast. Both of those apps are available for both the Mac and for the iPhone and will surely help the most disorganised person to get their life all tickitty boo and all sorted out.

We talk about Dropbox which is a great place to store you files online. Evernote for a note book that keeps your notes in the cloud so they are available where ever you are. I use Evernote too, in fact I had Evernote open during the interview because that was where I had my questions stored

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Podcasts recommended

Leo Laporte and the Twit network

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