Mark your calendars - I just got word from Daniel Park at dappertext that he's being interviewed tomorrow on all things Camtasia Studio and dappertext by 'Views from the Coop'.

You can hear Daniel's interview live on Blog Talk Radio here tomorrow at 3pm EST, If you can't listen live, they usually post the podcast to their site here within about a week (usually). I can't wait to hear Daniel's tips and tricks. I always learn something new from him.

Daniel also has a new newsletter that is dedicated to screencasting. You can sign up for it here.

Every two years my extended family gets together for a family reunion in Northern Wisconsin or the Upper Pennisula of Michigan. Last weekend happened to be family reunion time. So, my parents, sister, my 2 year old nephew and I, all piled in a car and drove 12 hours to the reunion. And, yes, you read that right. 12 hours in a car with a 2 year old!

When catching up with family members, it inevitably came up that I worked at a software company. Now raise your hand if you're the one in your family that everyone comes to for tech support or computer questions? I'm that person too! Well, this weekend was no different. Everyone wanted some computer help. In the past, I would try to help out family members via phone or email which isn't always easy and everyone ended up frustrated. But, this year, I'm going to go the Jing route!

So, you can guess what I'll be doing over the next week. I've been given a laundry list of questions and I'll be making screencast answers with Jing. Here's part of my list of screencasts: how do I move my iTunes library, how do I organize my photos, how do I update my antivirus software, how do I... ? And the list goes on. Anyone else using Jing for tech support for their family? What's been their reaction?

And, I'm also compiling the family photos from the weekend into a video slideshow using Camtasia Studio. You can see how to create this here.

See Tony Dunckel? He's the SnagIt Product Manager and is pictured to the left. Next to him is "Mouseman" - one of the old logos of SnagIt. As Product Manager, Tony gets to guide SnagIt's roadmap and part of his direction comes directly from you, the SnagIt users! Many of our best feature ideas come from you. And, our products are better because of the feedback you give us.

Now with that in mind, you've had a chance to play with SnagIt for a little while. If you had Tony's job as Product Manager, what would you do next? Any features you would like added?

The Training team is here to make you rock. We want you to be very successful with every product that TechSmith creates and understand all the great features the developers, user experience, and product managers come up with. Honestly, it’s about the coolest job ever; I work with awesome software and determined individuals.

When I started working with the SnagIt team, version 9 was about half way done. The user interface was 80% complete and the primary features for release were already in place. My job, with the information developer Kelly Mullins, was to convey the vision TechSmith had for SnagIt 9 and pass it along to you. But, since I came on late in the development cycle, I had to work within the existing structure and development time frame. For me, this meant being creative and flexible, something I’m sure you’re all familiar with. My first project was the 30-day tips, also known as the “Tip of the Day”, that appear during the trial period. In SnagIt 8, these were static graphics that highlighted a feature and had a link to a video. I wanted the SnagIt 9 tips to give customers a bit more guidance. Ideally, I wanted customers to look at this tip and be able to perform the steps after viewing it once. To do that, I knew I needed something more than just static images and text. I wanted something more dynamic. So, I decided to create animations that could convey the procedure or process.

Of course, the first thing I looked into using was Adobe Flash for the animations, but that requires each user to have the plug-in installed on their computer. Unfortunately, we have a lot of users that use SnagIt in corporate environments that may not allow Flash to run on their system. So, I applied a careful dose of Occam’s razor and decided on using animated GIFs for the tips. Animated GIFs have been around for a long time and they ensured 99.9% of our customer could view the animations. It also gave us a lot of control, with the fewest restrictions.

Using SnagIt and Photoshop we created 22 animations, 7 static graphics, and 1 graphic with a JavaScript mouse over effect. Of course, I didn’t do this all by myself; I had help from Anton Bollen (Instructional Specialist), Sylvania Dye, and Paul Middlin to get all the pieces to work together. I mentioned determined people above—these are the people I was talking about.

The other half of the SnagIt release was instructional videos. We created 15 videos for release, all of which you can find in the TechSmith Learning Center here. All of these are designed to introduce new customers to SnagIt and direct existing customers to their favorite features. These were a lot of fun to develop and I think are some of the best instructional videos ever released with SnagIt (post a comment if you disagree, I really appreciate the feedback.)

What’s nice is this isn’t the end to the training material for SnagIt 9. We got stuff already in the works and have plans for some exciting new ways to learn SnagIt and achieve that ever impressive status of “SnagIt Ninja”. As always, let us know what you enjoy and what doesn’t work for you. And, we’ll see you next time.

Chris McQueen is working on his degree in Instructional and Performance Technology from Boise State University.

Previous to TechSmith, Chris was a Technical Writer for a software company in Idaho and worked with the faculty at Brigham Young University-Idaho to help them integrate technology into their curriculum.

Currently he works with the SnagIt and Jing team. He loves his new Michigan home and doesn’t mind taking care of his kids when they’re sick. :-)

We're celebrating today at TechSmith because we've just released Camtasia Studio v5.1 in German! You can learn all about it here.

Dieter Schiecke also has a nice blog post here about the release and will be giving away a copy of the new software. Visit his blog and maybe you'll win a copy!

I'm also happy to announce that we have a new German Learning Center. It has 20+ written tutorials, plus tutorial videos! You can check it out here.

One of my favorite places to visit at work is our Shipping Department. That's where all the 'magic' happens! I'm always amazed at where our products are being shipped! Jason Hatch heads up our Shipping and Receiving Department. He's pictured above in the green shirt. I thought you'd like to hear some inside info from Shipping! Here's what Jason had to say...

Even new employees ask, “Does TechSmith have boxed software?” Believe it or not, we do and between 20-25% of our customers request a box.

These requests create a fair amount of work for the shipping department at TechSmith under normal circumstances, but during a product release, the workload can quadruple. It all starts with a large inventory influx of the new boxes about two days before release. Shipping boxes are pre-made to get a head start on the orders that will follow. The day of the release is always the most active: a continuous surge of orders are packed/sealed/labeled. With each release, the shipping department faces about 2-3 weeks of heavy shipping days. Once the release activity settles down, the overall volume plateaus at a higher point than before the release.

From large stocking orders for resellers to a single upgrade box to an avid customer, TechSmith will ship to every state in the U.S. and a majority of countries in the rest of the world.

Thanks for the insight, Jason! And, on a side note, you'll notice that the SnagIt box has gotten smaller. It's now in a DVD size box. Lucas Anthony from Shipping mentioned that with the release of SnagIt 9, our product box is now made from 100% Post-Consumer-Waste material! Also, the SnagIt 'Getting Started Guide' is manufactured with 100% recyclable “tree-free” synthetic paper. Our goal is to slowly transition the rest of the physical product components to more eco-friendly materials within the year; this will take place as the products release. And, you can always order the electronic download and bypass the boxed product entirely if you want to be really green.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Sales, Customer Service, and Technical Support teams, customers are still getting the quality of service they have come to expect despite the dramatic influx of interest surrounding the release of SnagIt 9.

Specific to Sales, everyone is very excited to be a part of such a significant release. We are busy answering all sorts of questions regarding pricing, capabilities, upgrade options and much more. We have people calling, emailing, submitting a web form, chatting, and even the occasional in person visit! It’s a lot of multi-tasking, something this team does naturally.

We love it when customers contact us directly. But we understand lots of people would prefer to upgrade on their own time. Lucky for them we have a wealth of resources online to help customers upgrade. Here are just a few…

If you do want to get a hold of us the very best way is our web form, located here. We promise this form is not long! It only asks the questions we need in order to help as fast and accurately as possible. And we’re here 8-8 eastern standard time (OK, so a little longer right now) so we generally get back to folks the same day.

Keep the requests coming, we look forward to upgrading each and every customer to SnagIt 9!

Favorite Feature

I’m a huge fan of the multi-image capabilities. I tend to bounce back and forth between multiple tasks all day, making the new version extremely useful in my workflow.

Brian Lesperance is the Sales Manager. He’s a graduate of Michigan State University and has been with TechSmith since 2002.

Take a tour here or if video is your thing, watch an intro video here!

And, don't forget to check out the Screencast.com blog for the latest news!

Have you tried Screencast.com? There is a free 60 day trial so you have nothing to lose. And, as you know, we're always looking for your feedback! Many of the improvements to Screencast.com's user interface have been the direct result of customer feedback. You can send your feedback to us in a couple different ways - you can use this form to email your feedback or feel free to comment here or on the Screencast.com blog.

The User Experience group works hand-in-hand with the development team from minute one of each new SnagIt release. The most important part of SnagIt for all of us is our customers, and our goal for SnagIt 9 was to mold SnagIt to the customer’s natural workflow, creating a flexible, worry-free environment where the customer can focus on being productive and creative. All of our decisions from very early on were born of this philosophy.

We started by conducting user studies even before version 8 was released. Using Morae, we watched people use SnagIt to learn not only what they did with our software, but what they didn’t do and why. Throughout the design process for SnagIt 9, we continually presented our ideas to customers using techniques ranging from traditional usability testing to exploratory methods in which we watched people do things they would want to do in SnagIt – combine images, mark them up, find images, etc. – using paper, pens, and physical tools rather than software. This research, combined with all of the feedback we’ve received over the years from our customers and the largest beta testing program in SnagIt’s history, informed our designs, which we repeatedly updated, retested, and updated again.

Several of our new features, including multi-image editing and the integration of the Catalog Browser functionality into the new Editor, had the potential to make SnagIt more complicated and harder to use. It was crucial to all of us that using SnagIt was easier and more flexible than ever before, and that presented some unique design challenges. Through team brainstorming, techniques such as root cause analysis and cognitive walkthroughs, and many types of customer research, the design for SnagIt 9 gradually evolved through paper-and-pencil mockups through rough interactive prototypes to the final design, with many sanity- and reality-checks along the way.

After exploring several ways of arranging tools in Editor, Microsoft’s new ribbon system stood out for several reasons: it’s highly visual, it’s compact and flexible, and, in our own usability tests, we were amazed at how easy it was for people to learn and use. And, of course, since many of our customers use SnagIt in tandem with Microsoft Office, our ribbon makes it easier to switch between them.

Do you know why SnagIt 9 is black? I’ll let you in on a little secret – it’s not because black is cool and trendy, but because the black interface makes content stand out. Since the point of SnagIt is to make and share great creative content, we felt that the interface shouldn’t be competing for attention, but should fade away and allow people to focus on their content. A dark interface and subdued colours in the Editor UI do just that, and your content “pops.”

The process of designing SnagIt 9 was very involved and challenging, but loads of fun. Our developers are the most talented and creative I’ve ever met, and the loyalty and enthusiasm of our customers is both inspiring and humbling. I’m truly proud of what we’ve done with SnagIt 9 and I hope you love it, too!

Favourite New Feature:

It’s gotta be the open captures tray… being able to just capture-capture-capture and not worry about saving. It’s fabulous.

Sylvania Dye is User Experience Designer for SnagIt. She has been designing graphics and software since the mid 1990s, and has been with TechSmith for 4½ years.

Here is one of the screencasts Beth made.

Beth made 11 screencasts for the top 11 things to know about Zumobi which you can view here. Why 11? As Beth puts it, "... you know, because 11 is better than 10"!

I love these screencasts because rather than point a camera at a phone and film, Beth used a phone emulator on her computer to show off Zumobi's mobile widget app and recorded it using Camtasia Studio. By doing this, the quailty of the video is better - you can easily see what's on the cell phone screen.

How did I learn about Beth's new screencasts? Via Twitter!

Any nominations for next week's Screencast of the Week?

Here at TechSmith, the Information Development team is the customer’s voice of TechSmith products. We strive to give information where and when our customers need guidance and provide feedback as customer advocates during the entire development process. An Information Developer is a member of the software product team from the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. We are at all times during development the active voice of the customer. The scope of our work is quite exciting and diverse and our role spans several different product teams.

The development of SnagIt 9 was a great opportunity for the Information Development team to create new and exciting user assistance collaterals that would accurately reflect the spirit, look, and feel of SnagIt 9 and it customers.

We began our user assistance journey by doing lots and lots of research. The big questions we wanted answered were: What do people need or want to know and what delivery method is preferred? We reached outward to our loyal customer base and inward to fellow TechSmith employees in each of our support services departments. To gather data, we used surveys, beta groups, questionnaires, and the monthly newsletters.

As a result of our research, we arrived at four overall goals that would guide every aspect of the creation of the User Assistance deliverables. These were:

To help us further define these goals, we made use of a theory called Create Problem Solving (CPS). Creative Problem Solving is the mental process of creating a solution to a problem. To qualify as CPS, the solution must either have value, clearly solve the stated problem, or be appreciated by someone for whom the situation improves. All situations do not need to be labeled as a problem. Other labels include a challenge, an opportunity, an improvable situation, or a situation where there’s room for improvement. SnagIt’s help file and online tutorials use CPS Diagrams to visually help solve customer situations by standing in place of a text-based table or a paragraph of text. For an image to work like a sentence, it has to have clearly defined, separate objects and some other parts indicating the relations of the objects. SnagIt’s callouts, arrows, and stamps were a perfect solution for creating CPS diagrams.

Enhanced Screen Tips were also developed for both main SnagIt and the new Editor to provide consistency between the two interfaces. These tips are larger windows that display more descriptive text than a regular tooltip. Enhanced Screen Tips can include an image and an F1 link to a help topic.

When the mouse pointer rests on a command on the ribbon tabs or anywhere on the UI where a tip resides, a ScreenTip is displayed to give you information about what that command does. At that time, if a customer presses F1 on the keyboard the help file will open to a tip specific topic.

Additionally, creating a help file that was optimized for localization was continually forefront in our development process. Since a large part of the cost of localizing a product comes from translating the written documentation, the cost of translating a largely text-based document versus a graphic-based document is significant. As a result of incorporating CPS diagrams that don’t have to be translated while implementing controlled English, the overall text in the help file was reduced by over 50% while the number of graphics that won’t need translation work increased by 90%.

Overall, the development of the SnagIt User Assistance deliverables was one of the biggest, yet most enjoyable challenges that I have had while working at TechSmith. In the end, we created a help file that we hope is not only a pleasure to read and peruse but is truly helpful for learning SnagIt. We also gave the 16 different Output and Add-in help files a makeover, uploaded over 50 new tutorials to the SnagIt Learning Center, created a unique and exciting poster for the boxed product, wrote helpful in-product help via the Enhanced Screen tips with context sensitive links, lowered localization costs, improved readability and understandability, and faithfully stood in as the voice of our customers during every part of the develop process. However, perhaps my very favorite accomplishment was at long last being able to kiss the help file’s boring text-based tables and instructions goodbye and replacing them with lots and lots of colorful SnagIt-made graphics.

Kelly Mullins is a long time resident of Flint, Michigan where she began her career in software development seventeen years ago. While a student at the University of Michigan, she helped pioneer a technical communications program focused on the emerging technology industry and became the first to graduate with that degree. The last six years have been spent at TechSmith where she has been a lead on the Information Development team working with the SnagIt and Camtasia Studio product teams.

I thought you might like a glimpse into what happens behind the scenes at TechSmith and how we created SnagIt 9. I asked several teams to do a guest blog post to share their role in the release of SnagIt 9. Up first is SnagIt Lead Developer, Paul Middlin. Enjoy!

SnagIt 9 was a huge release for us; we’ve been working on it for a long time. The team has had its nose hard to the grindstone for nearly 18 months. We work in an “agile” environment, to use the buzzwords of the day. This means that we regularly reassess our progress, try to take on small iterations of work, and generally make sure we’re always working on what’s most important for our users. Despite that, it was awfully hard to estimate how long this release was going to take; we were surprised at how “big” it was! That’s what happens when you have a strong dedication to doing it right- sometimes it takes a while.

We spent a lot of time exploring and brainstorming ways to really make “multi image” happen. We could have just said “hey, let’s throw some tabs in there.” We could have just introduced the “Open Captures Tray” and left it at that… but then you’d have a toolbar on the top, a pane on the right, a pane on the left, a tray on the bottom… and a pain in your…well, you get the gist. There would be no room left! I full rehaul of the Editor was in order. And while we were at it, we might as well finally converge all the many functions- the Editor, the Preview, the Catalog Browser. All for one and one for all.

There was a lot longer stretch between the “pretty UI complete” milestone and final shipping. That’s because between the early paper prototypes, workflow testing, UI testing, advisory groups and 750 person beta testing, we put this thing through the ringer. We wanted to make sure that if we were going to up and change our most beloved features that we did it well. You can’t just change how the arrow tool works and hope for the best!

We also spent a very long time in our ‘testing’ phase with this release. Yeah, we’re shipping with some known issues- but that’s because we tested it so much. Anybody who tells you there are no known bugs in their software at shipping time isn’t testing it hard enough. So, our team spent almost 5 months fixing, testing, refixing, retesting, polishing, scrubbing, rinsing and repeating. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.

It might have been a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. It’s very rewarding working so closely with our users and trying to really solve their problems in ways they might never have dreamed of. We’ve really created something here, and I hope you all like it!

FAVORITE FEATURE:

My favorite feature is the open captures tray; being able to capture away and work with multiple images saves me a lot of time and headaches.

Paul Middlin is the SnagIt Lead Developer. He graduated with a BS and MA from MSU and has been working at TechSmith for 5½ years, mostly on SnagIt.

We're having a fine time at Microsoft TechEd this week! I have to tell you about a proposal I'll never forget - I had to share this quick story!

Thomas Lee (pictured on the left) stopped by our booth today. And, he actually had a marriage proposal for SnagIt! You can read his blog post here that reiterates his marriage proposal! Thomas is a Microsoft MVP for PowerShell. And, uses SnagIt for articles he writes for magazines. I have to say that this is a first!

I will be posting my pics throughout the week on Flickr here. Enjoy!

I asked Thomas for a tip to share with you. His tip? "Install SnagIt!" I have to say I agree! ;-) What kind of gift do you bring to a wedding like this?!

Now, on to what's new! Click the screenshot below to view the 'What's New' video. And, you can read about all the new features here.

Here are some of my new favorite features. I'd love to hear what yours are.

Multi-image Capability - Now it's easy to combine images easily. I always found myself taking multiple screen captures and then wanting to edit and combine them. In the past, I would fight with SnagIt to do this. Not anymore! SnagIt 9 makes it easy to combine two or more images into one and recent captures are always visible in SnagIt's new Open Captures Tray. This makes it easy to drag-and-drop images onto the canvas to create a composite image.

Media Library - Often I want to take multiple screen captures but do not want to be bogged down to name the files or figure out where I want to save the files. SnagIt's new media library stores all of your captures automatically. And, you can view and sort your images however you like. It's easy to print or share multiple images via email or FTP.

Visual Search Pane - I'm always losing stuff - keys, files, papers… you name it. At least with SnagIt's new Visual Search Pane, I can find my screen captures later by date or website I captured it from. Now if SnagIt could just help me find my keys...

Custom Tagging options - SnagIt 9 helps me stay organized. As I capture images for projects, I can tag them with a keyword of "blog" or set the "Important" flag. I don't need to save anything in folders. I can view all the files I tagged "blog" with a click!

Nitty gritty details:

SnagIt 9 supports Microsoft Windows XP, XP x64, and Vista.

We also made a decision to update the price of SnagIt 9 from $39.95 to $49.95. We've made investments into SnagIt 9 to make it a more valuable tool for you and we hope you'll agree that SnagIt 9 is a better, richer, more versatile version of the software you love.

For the next 60 days, you can upgrade your existing copy of SnagIt for the upgrade price of $19.95. After 60 days, the upgrade price is $24.95.

Everyone at TechSmith would like to extend a big thank you to you - SnagIt would not be the product it is today without your loyal support. And, we know how much we owe you for SnagIt's success. We are better because of you.

And for a little trip down memory lane... Check out this screenshot of SnagIt v1.6! 17 years later, who could have guessed this “little” program, would become what it is today?! I can't wait to see what the next 17 years bring!

What's next? You tell me! I'd love to hear your feedback about SnagIt 9. Comment away!

I asked Mike more about his screencast. He mentioned that he made the screencast to help people see the new features of Firefox 3 in action.

Mike said, "Software is all about interactions with the user, and it can be hard to convey the same feeling and experience with screenshots and text alone. Jing made it really easy to do - I just picked my window, pressed a button, did my think, and then had a video that I could share with anyone. I used the built in microphone in my laptop (that's why you can hear me typing and clicking) and didn't really script anything; if I made a mistake, I could click "Restart" and start again. It took me about 20 "takes" to get it right."

You can see Mike's blog post about the Jing video here.

I'm glad Mike made a screencast about what's coming in Firefox 3! Now I'm really excited and ready to download when it's released!