Helpful Customer Feedback
August 23rd, 2006Since releasing Screen Mimic as a Universal Binary I have had a lot of great customer feedback.
One particularly helpful thing has been customers that have helped me to track down bugs. In the latest Screen Mimic release I fixed a bug that caused some QuickTime movies to play at the wrong rate. In other words, suppose you recorded a 23 minute movie. In some cases, depending upon your recording frame rate, the movie that would be generated was actually 22 minutes long. The movie didn’t get truncated, it was just playing slightly too fast.
This turned out to be due to a rounding error in the calculation of the QTTime timescale value. This probably would have gone unnoticed until Daryl, one of our customers, sent me a Quicktime movie he recorded of the analog clock from the System Preferences pane, making it clear the exact amount of time that should be reflected in the movie. I never would have thought of that.
About two days later another customer, Simon, (creator of Album Art Thingy, sent in a request for Screen Mimic to generate HTML output. His comment was:
“There doesn’t seem any obvious way to determine the natural resolution of a recorded .swf file - i.e. the width and height params I need for my embed/object tags. It would be really great if Screen Mimic could show me those params at the end of recording - even better if it could give me a sample <object> tag to copy and paste into my HTML.”
Notice he didn’t say: “Your product stinks because it doesn’t tell me the movie resolution…”
Instead he:
- Pointed out something that was missing for a specific use-case.
- Suggested one way to implement that something.
This approach is nice for me because I can ask myself “hmm, I wonder how common this use case is?”. (Obviously wanting to embed the output files of Screen Mimic into web pages is a very common use case.) I can then determine when and how to implement it.
I suspect that Simon knows how to be this helpful because he is a Mac developer himself.
Some
helpful
feedback:
would
love
to
use
Screen
Mimic,
but
I’m
running
an
operating
system
that
I
can’t
discuss.
Any
chance
you
could
do
the
same
and
get
it
working
there?
Thanks.
Oh,
and
apologies:
this
same
OS
kills
spaces
when
editing
in
webkit
(e.g.,
NetNewsWire).
Can I get a little bit of your help with making my declares in my app Universal Binary compliant? All this endian crap’s got me confused!
Chris: I’d love to start testing Screen Mimic on the the OS-which-must-not-be-named, as soon as Apple starts mailing copies of it to those of us that did not attend WWDC, we’ll get on it.
Josh: Happy to help, just drop me a line and let me know what you need.
Any chance to have screen mimic include audio recording ?
First off, I’d like to say how impressed I am by your work and with Screen Mimic in particular. After a quick search on the Versiontracker site (I believe my search criteria at the time was ‘desktop recording’ or something close to that), I was up and running with the demo.
I needed to record a streaming podcast (video and audio) for a school project (it was a free feed offered up on the iTunes site). Unfortunately I didn’t read the fine print until after I had recorded what I needed.
What I recorded looked great. The program worked like a charm but, like Stephane requested (comment no. 5), having the audio would have blown me away. Unfortunately the panel discussion I recorded (www.tvo.org/theagenda) lacked something (ha ha).
No worries though. In reading some of your blog comments I recall that 2.0 might include the audio element. Yahoo! So I wish you well in your endeavours and will sleep well knowing that someone like yourself is using their creativity and intelligence for good and NOT evil.
yours truly,
Rick P.