If you're like me, organizing both your physical desk and your computer desktop sometimes takes a back seat to other tasks and projects.
A lot of times I just put files and papers down that I need to work with right away, and then organize them later. If this is how you work with Screencast.com, we've made it easier to complete the organize later part.

So let's say you want to share a file immediately after uploading and you leave in your main library, and don't take the time to organize it. Or maybe you have a few files all related uploaded and you want to group them in a folder.

No problem. Now when you move your files the URL stays the same. I know I personally have a lot of files in my Jing folder... now I can organize them without breaking links that I sent out to customers, friends, and family. Not to mention all the customer videos I created, I can now sort them into folders that make more sense than when I created them a year ago.

Go try it out... organizing can still be a daunting task, but hopefully now, it's a little easier.

We've made a few other changes during this release as well. We also have a few other things underway that we're not quite ready to talk about - but know that we're making great progress on some features that we think you're going to appreciate.

I know that as a user of Screencast.com I am getting excited about the improvements coming and can't wait to see what you all think. And whether you like or loath the changes, we want to hear from you. We'd also love to hear your Screencast.com story.

Thanks,
Matt Pierce, TechSmith Training Manager
I Screencast - do you?

The Screencast.com team has been hard at work since last month's public launch. I told you all then that I was excited about the future of Screencast.com and I hope that our release scheduled for next Tuesday demonstrates what I'm talking about. Here's a peek at what will be on the menu:

MPEG-4 and H.264 support

Our Flash player will now support playing MPEG-4 content encoded with H.264, as well as FLV (with or without H.264), and SWF output created with Camtasia Studio or Jing. With the Quicktime and Windows Media Player browser plug-ins installed we still support .MOV (with and without H.264 encoding), and .WMV formats, so we're off to a good start with regard to supporting internet-based video content. We're still talking internally about Silverlight support so let me know your thoughts along those lines.

Media RSS (MRSS) support and auto-discovery

This is particularly exciting. I often use a public folder on Screencast.com to host a slew of vacation or event photos and then share the link to that folder. However, Screencast.com doesn't yet have a fancy view page with navigation controls, and so the better way to share the entire folder is with a Playlist, or embed a MediaRoll on my website or in a blog post. But even those options are somewhat limited by the design of the Playlist or my ability to update my Website quickly and easily. PicLens (http://www.piclens.com/) is an immersive, full screen environment that displays content (images and Flash video) as a dynamic wall of thumbnails. The wall can be manipulated with the click of a mouse to scroll and zoom, and you can switch to a "playlist-like" view of the folder contents with a single click. It has to be seen to be appreciated, but in my opinion, it's one of the neatest media display tools around, and mashing it up with your Screencast.com content is as easy as opening a public folder and clicking the PicLens icon in your browser's toolbar. If your viewer has PicLens installed in their Web browser, sharing a link to a folder of content just became the best view in the house.

There will be more coming on Tuesday so be patient and in the meantime, tell me what you think you need with regard to creating conversations around your media - we're working on threaded text comments and we're about to do our first iteration post-prototype. If you're interested in taking a look, drop me a comment or an email and we'll get in touch with you.

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager - Screencast.com
TechSmith Corporation

It's official! Screencast.com has lost its Beta tag and we're tickled orange to be the first TechSmith product to benefit from our major corporate rebranding effort. Our design team, UX group, information developers, marketing folks, and programmers have been working hard these past few months to put a gorgeous new face on a work flow that seems to be working really well for everyone.

While we were at it, we made a few more improvements - like when you create a new folder, you now have the details dialog pop up for you automatically. We have a completely new Help Center that contains all your answers to questions you probably haven't even thought of yet. We have a new Tools page that will point you in some interesting directions for content creation and sharing, and we now handle the new Adobe FLV content type correctly. We even have some shiny new hardware on the back-end that gives our multi-server architecture an even better level of performance.

Pretty graphics and bright colors notwithstanding, I think you will see for yourself just how easy it still is to upload, manage, and share your content with your customers, colleagues, and clan. So enjoy the new look and in a few days I'll share a bit more about where we're going from here (like H.264 encoded playback and creating a conversation around your content - oops that might be too much sharing )

After nearly 18 months of development and feedback, the Screencast.com logo is about to lose its Beta tag. We started out with a simple goal: to let our users upload, manage, and share their digital content (produced primarily in TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio) in a way that didn’t affect the original quality of that content, or the owner’s intellectual property rights. That’s it – nothing fancier was really defined when the original Screencast.com product idea was hatched. In the beginning, several obstacles stood in our way. Issues like an immature backend infrastructure, a confusing workflow, questionable design and UI elements, etc. I’m pleased to say that these issues have been addressed and with the completion of a rebranding effort that marks the beginning of a TechSmith-wide rebranding effort, the Screencast.com service has definitely grown up.

I think you’ll agree that what Screencast.com has become is in some ways similar to a pop-video hosting site where content can be uploaded and shared with people across the internet. But that’s where the comparison ends. While many of these sites take one type of video format and re-render it into a lower quality, smaller bit-rate video that’s easier for them to deliver (at the expense of your quality production), Screencast.com doesn’t do that. Instead, what we have morphed into is more like a basic online file system with a public and several secure storage mechanisms, a presentation layer (view page and Playlists), and easy to use sharing options. What’s even more exciting in my opinion is our use of RSS to deliver public content in a variety of ways. And while it’s relatively easy to understand our methods of storage, presentation, and sharing, it’s a little more complicated to fully grasp what RSS offers users of Screencast.com. So in a future post I’m going to take on the responsibility of talking about the many ways content owners can deliver their media using the powerful mechanism of RSS.

However, now is not the time to stand by and congratulate ourselves. Screencast.com has a LOT more to offer in the future; and while I don’t want to understate the importance of our unveiling of the new Screencast.com, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve been releasing customer facing features and making improvements month after month for at least the past year. Given our TechSmith fueled foundation toward customer service and support, we will continue to do so for as long as our customers find value in what we produce.

So keep your thoughts and ideas coming and we’ll do our best to keep up with you, and happy screencasting!