The Visual Lounge lets you find out about TechSmith behind-the-scenes. Watch screencasts and videos from other customers, meet up with your fellow TechSmith users and staff, and get more tips and tricks!

If you're a Screencast.com user, you may have noticed some new features available to you today!

Customizable Pages: If you're a Screencast.com Pro user, you can now change the color, upload your logo, change the headers and footers, and customize your Screencast.com pages.

Training made a great video showing how to customize your Screencast.com pages. Check out the screencast below. It runs less than 3 minutes.

Optimized Display: One of the nice things about Screencast.com is that it does not alter your content by resizing or recompressing it. But, sometimes I'd have a problem sharing my image or video created on my large monitors. Often my viewer would have a smaller display. They'd end up having to scroll to see the image or video. Not ideal for my viewer or my content. Now Screencast.com will display your images and videos automatically at 800 × 500. This ensures that your viewers will not have to scroll and have a better experience viewing your content. And, they have the option to see your image or video full size if they choose. Oh, and your original file will not be altered.

My image before optimized display (Scrolling needed! Booooooo!):

My image after optimized display (No scrolling needed to see whole pic. W00t!):

Thumbnails: If you're like me, you have several different types of files in your folders. We've added icons for Flash, Quicktime, WMV, Camtasia Studio, PDF, and images so viewers can tell what type of file they are going to view.

Content Navigation: Viewers can now move easily between your content. You'll notice that there are now thumbnails below your content and above are 'previous' and 'next' controls. Viewers can easily navigate through multiple files you want to share.

I hope you like the new features! And, as always, we need your feedback to build better products. What would you like to see in Screencast.com next?

You can keep up to date on all the TechSmith blogs, including the Screencast.com one, here.

"The stars at night, are big and bright... Deep in the heart of Texas!!!" I always think of that song when I'm in Texas. I'll spare you my singing (you can thank me later). Next week, the TechSmith crew is heading down to Austin, Texas for the SXSW Interactive Festival! Tony Dunckel - the Snagit and Jing Product Manager, Mike Kujansuu - the Camtasia Studio and Morae Marketing Manager, Brooks Andrus - Senior Flash Developer, and I are headed south to the event.

I have 10 One-Day Tickets to the SXSW Interactive Festival to give away! First come, first serve! The ticket is good for one of the following days:

• Saturday, March 14, Noon - 6pm
• Sunday, March 15, Noon - 6pm
• Monday, March 16, Noon - 4pm

If you'd like a ticket, email me or contact me on Twitter (@betsyweber or @techsmith).

If you're in the area or attending SXSW, we'd love to meet up with you, hear your feedback about the products, do a screencast, or just hang out! Beverage of your choice is on me!

After SXSW wraps up, I'll be headed to Microsoft Mix09 in Las Vegas. Same rule there. Email or tweet me if you'd like to meet-up! I'd love to see you there!

One of the steps in software development is to beta test the software. And, we could use 50 - 100 beta testers for Camtasia for the Mac. Interested? Just fill out this shortly survey here.

Troy Stein and the Camtasia team will review the submissions shortly. And, if you're accepted to beta test, you'll hear from them shortly.

Thanks for your help in the development of Camtasia for the Mac! We could not do it without you.

One request I hear is to add OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functionality to Snagit. There is a work-around if you'd like to do this with Snagit.

Why would someone want OCR functionality? Well, say you need a list of all the file names you have in a directory (song list, photo names, expense reports, etc). You could manually type them out one by one, but that takes too long. Or, sometimes you might want to convert a picture or PDF that has text into editable text.

If you have Microsoft Office, there is an easy way you can utilize OCR with Snagit. You can use Snagit with Microsoft Office's built-in OCR software. It's called Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI). Chris McQueen recently made a great tutorial for the Snagit Newsletter showing exactly how to do this. Check it out here.

Try it out! It's a great time saver...

What other tasks would you like to do with Snagit?

After taking some time off, I think it's time to get back into the Screencast of the Week here on the Visual Lounge...

I was lucky enough to attend Microsoft Mix last week in Las Vegas. While there, I met up with the colaab guys (that's Bob and Jonathan on the left sporting some nice kilts!) who had crossed the pond from Scotland to attend the event.

I found out that colaab had used Camtasia Studio to make some of their demo videos. I picked them as this week's Screencast of the Week for a couple reasons. Not only did I enjoy their videos (Scottish accent makes for great voice overs. :-) ) but also colaab seems like it would be a great tool for people that use TechSmith products.

colaab offers real-time collaboration over a wide range of resources, all through the web browser. That means you could import something like video made with Morae or Camtasia Studio (WMV file) or an image or document made with Snagit (PDF, PNG, JPG, GIF) for easy collaboration with your team.

I uploaded a Camtasia Studio WMV in colaab and was easily able to add comments and annotations at any point on the video timeline. It kind of reminds me of the old VH-1 show, Pop-up Video. I made a quick Jingcast to show how to add comments and annotations on a Camtasia Studio WMV in colaab. You can see it here (note - there is no audio).

With more people needing to work with teams around the world, colaab seems like a great way to collaborate online and cut down travel expense. There is even a free trial.

You can see many of the colaab screencasts here.

There was also a 'Show Off' contest at Mix09. And, Bob made this great screencast with Camtasia Studio to show off a prototype application - DeepZoom Visual Site Search. You can check out the screencast here. And, read more about the project on their blog here.

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week? No kilt required, but it is encouraged. :-)

Remember those math story problems you had to do in school growing up? I know, I'm trying to forget them too. :-) They'd walk you through a scenario (A freight train leaves the station traveling 30 mph... ) and you'd work your way through the math problem. These exercises would help you learn some new fundamentals in math.

Matt Pierce, our Training Manager, has created something similar - a Camtasia Studio Walkthrough that will take you through a project to learn the fundamentals of Camtasia Studio. You can find the PDF here. Feel free to print it, pass it out at work or in your presentation, email it... share it any way possible!

Like this type of resource? What else could you use? We're always looking for new ways to help you!

On the road again... just can't wait to get on the road again! I always find myself humming that old Willie Nelson tune when I'm packing my suitcase.

And, this week is no different! On Monday (March 30), I'm heading San Francisco with Dirk Frazier, the Screencast.com Product Manager, and Justin Welsch, from R&D, for the Web 2.0 Expo.

It's my first year attending the Web 2.0 Expo so I'm excited to see what the conference is like. If you're in the Bay Area or attending the conference, we'd love to meet up. First round of a beverage of your choice is on me! Just email, call or text (cell: +1.517.410.0030) or tweet me!

This week's Screencast of the Week came to me by way of a Twitter contact, Alan Lepofsky. I picked this screencast from SocialText as the Screencast of the Week for a several reasons. I love the use of SmartFocus and Callouts! Plus, I like that they used a screencast to show off SocialText in action - I can see how it works before I download it. Click the screenshot below to start the video.

And, if you're on Twitter, we'd love to hear from you! A couple of us from TechSmith are on Twitter - you can find me here, TechSmith's Education Evangelist, Dave McCollom, here, and, TechSmith, here.

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week? Email me or leave a comment below! Happy screencasting!

If you're like me, when researching and learning about a new product, I like the combination of seeing the product in action (videos and screencasts) plus some write-ups and reviews to understand it. Sometimes if I'm really lucky, I can get a live demo of the product at a tradeshow or other event.

If you learn like I do, you're in luck. I just got word from the Camtasia Relay team that they're doing live webinars weekly. So, if you would like to see the product in action or have questions for the team, you can attend one live. Details are here. There is one webinar for Presenters and a separate one for Administrators.

I hope you're able to attend! Do you find webinars useful? If so, would you like to see them for our other products?

You've spoken and we've listened! As promised, we brought back the FLV format in Camtasia Studio v6.0.2 today.

Download the update here. It is a free upgrade if you purchased Camtasia Studio v6.

If you'd like to see everything updated in Camtasia Studio v6.0.2, visit here.

Thanks for your patience and feedback. We appreciate it! What would like to see added to Camtasia Studio next?

Lots of good news at TechSmith today. In addition to putting FLV back in Camtasia Studio v6.0.2, I'm happy to announce that Camtasia Studio v6.0.2 is now available in German! Details are here.

And, we've launched a German version of the Visual Lounge Blog! The content will be similar to this blog, but in German :-) and with some additional contributing editors. So, for all the news, some tips and tricks and to see the great things people are doing with our German versions of software, please visit here.

And, you can view other blogs at TechSmith here.

Bis bald!