The panelists discuss App Preview and AppShow with Daniel Foster and Mike Malinak of TechSmith.

 

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 75 of the iPhreaks Show. This week on our panel we have Pete Hodgson.

Hello, from California’s Indian [inaudible 01:01].

Jaim Zuber.

Hello from Minnesota’s first day of cold, rainy fall.

I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv and we have two guests. We have Daniel Foster.

Hi, right in the heart of Michigan.

And Mike Malinak.

Also in Michigan where it’s pretty much winter all the time.

Isn't that the state motto?

Yes [chuckling]. Road construction and winter – that’s what we’ve got [chuckles].

They don’t call us The Mitten State for nothing.

The tourism board really needs to work on that. Maybe we could swap because California has a boring lack of snow in the winter time, so we could give you some of that – some of our sunshine – and you could give us some of your snow.

When I was in college, I worked in Alaska for the summer, and it snowed in July. The running joke was always that they have two seasons: they have winter and construction season [chuckling].

Were you fishing?

They would warm up and then they would fix all of the roads.

No, I actually worked at a lodge and I did IT there, so I got to go do all of the cool stuff at a deep discount, which was a lot of fun.

That sounds like fun.

I heard Alaska has a lot of mosquitos.

I don’t remember it being too bad.

Maybe you were in the right part of Alaska. It’s a pretty big place, I think.

Yeah, maybe.

My American geography isn’t that good, but I think it’s quite big.

Yeah, it is. Anyway, we brought you guys on to talk about doing app previews. This is a feature that Apple either just added or is about to add? I don’t remember.

Yeah, just added. If you go to the front of the Apple Store, on your iOS 8 device you'll see, in fact, a new featured playlist that’s called “Introducing App Previews” and you can browse them to your heart’s content.

Cool! You guys work for TechSmith, right?

That's right, yup.

And you have a new product that puts together these previews? In fact, I'm acting like I don’t know, but you guys showed me what it is.

Yeah, some people don’t know TechSmith; a lot more people know SnagIt or Camtasia, and so we’ve kinda been for 25+ years the go-to for screen capture, screen recording kinds of things. AppShow came about when we were at – Mike was actually at WWDC, and as we saw this new opportunity that Apple was providing to make these videos for the App Store for your app listing, they also then announced at the same time a new technology where you could connect your iOS 8 device to a Mac running Yosemite with a lightning cable, and then you could directly capture from the screen. This is the first time ever that you could do this without jailbreaking.

So wait, were you guys, at that moment, did you feel like you were being sherlocks and they were stealing your product, or like they were giving you a whole new product?

Do you mean like one of the other 50 things that got sherlocked this year? [Crosstalk 03:49] Yeah [chuckles].

Yeah.

No kidding, right?

No, it was really the latter. We looked at this and said, we can finally do this at a level of quality that is far beyond what we have been able to do before. Other people have done similar things, like Daniel said, either you're going to jailbreak or you had to go through the painful process of doing an AirPlay-based system, or your over-the-shoulder camera recording of something.

People have been talking about this to us, because they looked at what we were doing in other areas, and asking for it a lot. This was Apple actually giving something instead of taking something away from us, so we were happy about that.

Do people in the past, have they just – have people also just used the simulator and just recorded the simulator? I assume that’s another alternative.

Oh yeah, for sure. But then you end up into those problems of “Hey, I want to be able to have a camera” or it depends on tilt or any of those sorts of things. Those get a lot more painful.

Yeah, pinch zooming with that awkward-like [inaudible 04:44].

Yeah, how many times [chuckling] repositioning your fingers doesn’t really look natural. There's definitely something to be said for getting to do that with the actual device.

Well, and before – I mean, you'd go in and look at an app and it would show you pictures of the app, but you didn’t actually have videos where it’s, “You tap here, you tap here; you do this. It brings this up.” It makes your life better in all these different ways; you didn’t have a great way of showing that off and it seems like, “Okay, now we do. Now here we go.”

I definitely saw people doing this on their own websites though, before. I mean, the two differences are a.) it’s in the App Store now and b.) there's a way of doing it without having to do some hokey hackery to make it look good.

Yeah, and I think the stuff on websites will continue to exist – those longer marketing videos that tell a bigger story, that show a lot of the – like the sandwich video ones that are just well-done. They give you the use cases, or “These are the kinds of people that use it and how happy they are,” but I think that in the App Store, it’s kind of going to become table stakes to have the 30second video as well as your screenshots.

It’s really more of that moment of decision, right? If you got there and it’s a free app and you already decided you want it, you don’t even read the description let alone watch the video – who cares? But if you're determined, deciding between a couple of apps or you're just in app browse mode, I think it’s going to be big.

The other kind of cool thing that Apple is doing – and it makes me wonder where they're going with this – is if you search in the App Store and look at the categories and stuff like that, they're starting to show those in the thumbnail that comes up in search results, the play button. Some of the apps have a play button and some don’t, depending on whether they have a video attached. And so I think that starts to give you a little bit of a boost even in the area of discovery.

What should people be looking at when they're putting together this app preview? I think this is really the meat of the conversation because ultimately – and this is something that I've told several people; I have people coming to me and they're like, “Well, I decided to build this app and I couldn’t find anybody who is cheap enough to do it for me, so I decided to just do it on my own,” and then we start having the conversation of, “So I've spent the last month working on it and I'm almost done.” I tell them, “Yeah, you're almost done with the first 20%, which is building your app. And then the other 80% is getting people to buy your app and use your app.”

How do you make a killer app preview that people want, or going to watch it and go, “Oh I have to have this”?

The main things to focus on – and with 30 seconds – you got to be selective. I've seen a few app previews where clearly they were trying to cram a list of every single feature in, and you'll even see some people do almost like a stop-motion – it’s like a hundred different shots in 30 seconds, and it probably doesn’t get the point across.

My advice would be, focus on the couple of things that really help differentiate your app. Hopefully there are some things like that, right, so if you haven’t a very interesting, distinct app, then probably go back to square one. But if you have, then what is it that helps set it apart from the look-alikes? Make sure to show those things and focus on those.

If they kind of have those moments of delight, whether it’s interactions in your app that are just really cool and you spent way too much time on those, and you're like, “I've invested all this energy in these.” Make sure you show those. Again, the things that are moving or that require motion to really understand, use that space to focus on those as well, because you still have the screenshots, and those can still tell a lot of the story and give some of those pieces but they can’t show what things look like when they're moving, when there's animation.

I'm curious how the people are doing all the features – they get their marketing people, saying, “We need to show every feature.” Are they highly-editing these videos? Or are they just like training and clicking as fast as they possibly can on every little button in their app?

It’s a mix. I've definitely seen some that look very edited where it’s maybe even a series of screenshots almost, that are just packed in there. Or that there's a lot of clip speed applied so that everything’s sped up a lot, but again, that might work if the point of your video is really to just overwhelm people with “It can do a million things! Here’s 950,000 of them.” Maybe that’s okay, but I'm still going to go on record to saying that just focusing on the few things is probably going to give people a lot better sense of how they would use it.

And put yourself in their shoes, right? What is that they're trying to decide? What are their determination criteria for deciding whether to buy your app or download or not? And what can you say about those things?

I think that one thing that Daniel said is making sure that there isn’t really going to be a one-sizefits-all for all of these. It’s not going to be a “Well make sure that you show your splash intro screen,” or “Make sure that you always do this type of cut out.” People need that flexibility because everybody’s apps are so different. You wouldn’t think of – heck, even Facebook’s app versus Paper, showing the same sort of look and feel to it. As much as we have the difference in apps, you're going to have those differences in videos and what those feel they're supposed to be like.

Another area I would spend a lot of time on getting right is the music. I've seen a few silent videos and they feel a little weird to watch. Granted some people are going to have their volume switched off on their hardware and they're not going to be hear anything, be flexible so that in that case you still have an intelligible message. But if you do use music, I would encourage people to use music, and then spend some time finding that track that really gives the feel, that gives the right emotion that people are going to have when they're using your app.

Because that’s a lot of it too, right? “This app is going to make me feel great about getting exercise.” Or “I use the Runtastic one; it’s going to make me feel great about doing pushups for Pete’s sake.” Setting that tone.

How much does it cost to get the Rocky theme? [Chuckling]

Just buy the soundtrack.

Yeah.

It’s just a video of someone doing pushups – no screenshots, no nothing.

That’s right. There are so many questions, and that’s one of them too. Just joking aside, licensed music, right? How is Apple – we have a guy on our team who’s like this encyclopedia of songs, and he was listening to one the other day and he’s like, “The music in that app preview is from Tron.” I was like – and sure enough, Shazam identified it as Tron.

I don’t know if Apple has, the way YouTube does, this matching service that’ll try to find licensed or commercial music and then throw it out. I honestly don’t know what they do for that.

I can imagine someone making some money out of going and finding these and sending people scary letters, but I can’t imagine the Tron guys would be super, super freaked out that someone was using it for an app. Well, I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t.

One of the things Apple does, to take it over to that, what is Apple suggesting and what are their rules for some of this, they do say to make sure that you have ownership and the license to use anything that you're putting into these. So I think they're trying to push that back on to dev somewhat, the people submitting these. Make sure you're allowed to use this audio or that you’ve licensed it; make sure that anybody that you're showing in the videos, you actually have the right to show them. Don’t be showing personal information and things like that.

Apple is, whether or not they are doing automatic checks there, they're sort of putting that onus on to the developers and the people submitting them to make sure that you're allowed to be doing it.

So how do you find music that’s free to use?

Oh, boy [chuckles].

That’s one of the problems that we want to solve. I think it’s not there for v1; we have looked into it quite a bit.

There are some sources that have aggregated just a ton of license tracks that are royalty free or pay-once-to-use, and so one idea that we've had is to have a library actually built into AppShow that makes that easy, and there are a couple of things that make it easy.

One is not getting in trouble on the licensing end, so you're taking care up there, you pay your small fee and you're good to go. You're not going to get denied – because your whole binary gets rejected, right? I mean, if your video’s wrong, your binary gets rejected and you got to go back into the review cycle.

Secondly, helping you even pick the right music. Some of these catalogs have a lot of metadata for mood and beats per minute and all these kinds of stuff, and so we want to make that easier so you could even do the picking a lot without spending hours and hours trying to find that one track.

This is also a conversation that podcasters have a lot because they want intro music to their shows. There are a few resources that I can point out for royalty-free or licensed music that you can use. One of them is Music Alley. It used to be pod-something music and the idea was that it was pod-safe music, so it was music that was safe to use in your podcast because it was creative commons licensed or something like that. And then I've also bought music from musicbakery.com and jewelbeat.com, and all of those will give you a license to use their music in whatever. Anyway, those are some resources.

But it would be interesting if, like you said, in the product there was a library that you could just say, “Well I just want to use that one and I’ll pay a buck for it.”

Right, yup. And a couple of other sites that we would point people to as well just to add a couple more links – Kevin MacLeod, his site is Incompetech. It’s kind of a funny name, but he does attribution licensing, so as long as you can give attribution either in your video, a small part at the end, or in the description of your app somewhere.

Interestingly, YouTube has boosted up their number of tracks you can use for free, and their terms of service say that you could actually use it for any video, so it’s not limited to a YouTube video.

Yeah, that’s right. I forgot that they had – I keep wanting to say “open sourced” but they have opened up quite a library there, too.

Yeah, the YouTube audio library is actually interesting because they're going out and soliciting from people. I know that they actually commissioned work from people to get it into there too, so those people are getting some amount of payment for that also, which is nice to see them do, sort of giving out to the community.

And if it’s like an independent artist, you can always email them and say, “Hey, I'd like to use this video” and a lot of times, they’ll be okay with it. I produced a couple of CDs and every once in a while I get a request, “Hey, I want to use those for my magic show” and I'm like, “Go ahead, awesome!”

That’s cool.

The theme music for JavaScript Jabber is actually that –. One of the panelists really liked the band that had released a – just put an album out there, and so he contacted them and said, “Hey, can we use this song for our show?” And they were like, “Yeah, sure.”

It’s an awesome song as well, I really like it. I keep on meaning to ask what that song is.

It is The Bailing by Inu.

Okay.

Cool.

I get asked that a lot, so I just know the answer off the top of my head [chuckling].

DANIEL: Great.

Shazam it.

So one other question I have, it seems like you could do 30 seconds of just using your app. “Okay we tap here, okay we tap here, we move, scroll up, scroll down, whatever” or you could do different segments, so “Here’s the contacts” and it shows you selecting a contact and doing this and doing that other thing. And then you move over to the email section and then you tap an email and you reply it to the email and you send the email, then you move over to the next section so you could have four or five short little segments that show off different parts of your app. Is one approach, do you think, more appropriate to different types of apps than others?

I think that the types of videos you're going to make really vary. We’ve seen from games and things like that, it’s really tough to –. You're not going to show an entire progression of “Here’s your character at the very beginning and you'll be able to show entire levels.” Trying to do a walkthrough in 30 seconds isn’t necessarily going to be the most valuable use of your time, but if you can focus on those things that really sort of set it apart, that’s really good.

48]. If you show somebody a calendar and then all of a sudden you're just somewhere completely different, you need that sort of transition or context switch and you need to sort of prep people a lot more for it. So I think it varies a lot by the app type and the design.

For the ones that do have kind of those segments or chapters if you will, I think one of the best practices we’ve seen is to use these text cards or kind of a title screen in between. And so you fade through to black, and then up on to this small amount of text and remember that you can’t localize these so use easy-to-understand word, so if people are looking at this and it’s their second language, they can still get it.

Then fade it to that text card, then fade back out and make that really quick – just a couple of seconds each – so you can sandwich those in between and help set up what you're going to see next.

Do you see people doing narration for this, or is that a bad idea? Because you said, if the audio’s turned down, they're obviously not going to hear it. Do you think it’s a bad idea to try and narrate the product while you're just demonstrating it?

I think that it can add, again, depending on the app. I wouldn’t make my whole video depend on it and make no sense without it, obviously, for both the volume-switched-off reason and then the “I don’t speak that language” reason. But I do think that especially in ones where you're maybe trying to talk about some of the use cases, or it’s not obvious how this app makes my life better and maybe you need to bolster that little bit more, you can’t put that visually into your app preview in most cases; you can’t have happy, smiling people using your app. So I think giving a little bit of that context, it’s often going to happen in those – either the text or that narration.

That was actually one of my other questions is, I know with the regular – I guess old-fashioned now – just screenshots of the apps, some people cheat there and they kind of make it not really a screenshot but more just like a brochure with –. It’s not just a screenshot putting in text, or maybe not even showing the app at all. Are you allowed to that or will Apple reject you if you just have an actual video clip of someone using your app, literally a video of someone using it rather than the actual app itself?

Their guidelines say you can’t do that. There are a couple of examples out there. On screenshots, you're not supposed to show the device, in my understanding. You don’t show the actual iPhone or iPad, but yet you see a lot of screenshots that have that in it.

The guidelines are really clear saying, “No over the shoulder, no camera video. Unless you have a camera app, then you can show something being recorded.” But then you do see few, and it’s hard to know – did those just slipped by or are they going to get taken down later, or is this sort of the beginning of the end of enforcement of the guidelines? My feeling is it’s still really early and a lot of that stuff is going to shake out.

It’s always fun when there's new Apple rules and regulations and people are not quite sure what they can get away with, what stuff Apple cares about, what stuff Apple doesn’t care about.

Yeah, and these are humans on the other side that are known to make these calls. The same people who are proving the apps themselves in the screenshots, they're watching these videos and trying to make that call. So yeah, we might see a little bit of variation in what gets through in the same way that we saw plenty of that with screenshots too.

You said that you can record video direct on your iOS 8 device? IOS 8 is fairly new – do we actually know how that’s going to work?

Well so that recording actually happens on the Mac. You're connecting them, and there's nothing you install on the device, which is kind of interesting. You just plug in and then it’s actually either the client is – QuickTime will do it if you're on Yosemite, or something like AppShow can do it, and then the recording ends up over there on the Mac.

And they do come over at a really high frame rate, so it’s like 60fps; there's a pretty high resolution, and in a lot of cases, not native resolution but it’s quite high. It’s sort of targeted to the resolution that Apple wants you to use, which is another one of the interesting things we’ve been trying to unravel the last week or so, as these started hitting the App Store. Once the iPhone 6 devices came out, Apple started saying that you need to actually record a separate video on each device screen size – so the 5.5”, the 4.7” and the 4”. You should record three of these videos and upload them in iTunes Connect.

But then we see some reports from people saying, “No, I only made one – a 4” video – and it’s up there, and you can see it on all the devices” so there's a little bit of figuring out on that still. My advice would be to start with just the one if you can do one video at one of the larger resolutions, and then only put it in – because there are different slots in iTunes Connect for the different media screenshots and videos, and if you only fill out one of those and it gets approved, then you're probably good to go. It seems like they actually are scaling stuff on their server.

That’s interesting. If I record, I could record a video for an iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and an iPad let’s say, and then depending on which device the person buying or browsing App Store is using, they’ll see a different video?

Yeah, those two definitely are working that way, for sure. If you have a universal app, you want to do at least one iPad and one iPhone version.

The iPhone 6 Plus has the special case. When it’s in landscape, it actually can function differently, so you can get different layouts. That’s why they're encouraging that you do each of those.

We do know that some people – their app did have a different layout in landscape with the 6 Plus and tried to submit the same video, just sort of resized across all of those, and it got rejected because it didn’t actually match what they were seeing on the 6 Plus. It can still get tricky in there.

They must be spending a lot of time looking at all of these videos and comparing them to the actual apps.

Yeah, they must have an army of people who just tear their eyeballs out every day [laughter]. I can imagine.

If I hear one more, chirpy, royalty-free song that goes along with this, I'm going to pull my ears off.

It’s all ukuleles and hand claps.

Yeah. Does it differentiate between different sizes of iPhones? If I'm on an iPhone 5 and I'm looking at previews, will it only show my iPhone 5 previews, or just iPhone previews?

The 4” class of phones, that’s how it’s supposed to work. What's interesting is if – so they’ve uploaded a special version for the iPhone 5; that’s what you're going to see. That’s the whole 4” class. What's interesting is that if you browse through the store even on a 4S, which doesn’t actually fit any of these, you can still see app previews. So you're seeing a resolution that isn’t even necessarily the same for the other ones. They’ll show up in a Pillarbox video for a lot of us.

Pretty much I think what Apple is trying to do is recognize the fact that it’s more useful to show somebody an app preview than to completely cut them out of it if they don’t quite have the – if the app developer doesn’t have the exact, right video up there for that device. But they're encouraging everybody to try and make them for as many of the device specifications as they can –that’s three different iPhone or iPod sizes, and the one iPad size.

It’s almost Android-ish.

Yeah, for now. Until we see whatever the next iPad is going to hold for us too, right?

What about landscape versus portrait? I guess you don’t really have that many options there. You’ve got to choose one of them. Can you choose one over the other, or does it have to be portrait, or –?

You get to pick on that front, whichever one it is that you want to show. I believe that you even can decide per different – you could have a 6 Plus video be landscape and your 5 video be portrait.

But I think that switching in the middle is probably not going to work well because you could end up with a portrait, tiny video within a landscape frame. That could get real quirky to switch.

I don’t think video supports switching the aspect rations in the middle of –.

No. What format of video are we talking about here?

They have specifications for what you can upload, and I actually put together an ultimate guide to app previews – maybe we can link to it from the show notes – that goes into a lot of these technical details. It’s not just the format of the file, but they also want a particular encoding as well.

Honestly, that’s one of the things that we try to do in AppShow is say, if we can just give you what you need, then you don’t have to become an expert in this. It’s been interesting; Apple put out a guide for using Final Cut Pro to make these, and it’s pretty complicated. Some people are using iMovie, but you have to also use HandBrake to get the final file format, and so we’re trying to just make that a little easier.

It’s .mov, .m4v and .mp4 – the videos that they support – and then depending as far as what's in them, they can be ProRes 422 or they can be H.264 encoding.

Yeah. One other thing that occurs to me is that you could use the functionality that we talked about earlier where you record your iOS 8 phone onto your computer, and you could put together a longer demo on your website.

Yeah, and we’re really targeting, obviously not just the 30-second video use case, because I think we’ve been talking about it as kind of the tip of the spear that there's need right now for a lot of developers to get those up in the store just to kind of compete. But we’re looking beyond that to, say, a little bit longer for videos – still short-ish; I think that’s our sweet spot.

We’ve talked to developers who say, “I'm not making any training videos to answer those common questions that I get, namely because it’s just a pain and it takes too long,” or “I don’t even know how to get started, to capture the screen.” And so we've really been focused on being able to answer that need as well with some of the next iterations that we have coming down the pipe.

What's really unique about AppShow is what we’re doing is not trying to recreate a nonlinear editor. We have Camtasia, and that’s a nonlinear editor, and we feel like we made something that’s very easy to use there and approachable. But with AppShow, we’re saying, “You start out not recording a huge, long section of content and then trying to find the best minute out of 10 minutes of recorded material; you’re actually starting to structure your content as you go.” So we encourage you to start out more with a kind of a template or framework in place, and then you're filling these pods or scenes as you record. And so your whole video is kind of taking shape before your eyes instead of this –.

I don’t know about you, but I've been in that quagmire of “Now I've invested four hours and I'm trying to move things around, and I can’t remember which bits were the good bits and which weren't.” We’re really trying to make that a little bit more streamlined for people who've maybe never made a video before in their life.

App preview’s one thing you might use a video software for, but there's also other things like if you're doing a sales presentation – things like that. Do you have ideas for how you would do a video differently for these different cases?

Yeah. A sales demo, for example – it’s going to come down to what is the content. So maybe we’re talking about PowerPoint, or it’s a .pdf or something that’s got those slides and you're swiping through and talking over it; that’s not our core focus right now. I think you'd be able to put something together doing that, but right at this point, we’re not supporting simultaneous voice narration as you capture the screen; it’s a two-step process. Quite often, for a sales thing, you might want to have it live like that, recording both at once.

One of the things that we are doing is looking at how our AppShow tool will work with Camtasia, which gives you that sort of unbounded, multi-track, nonlinear editor, and I think that’s probably where we would point people for a big, 20-minute sales demo or something that they want to do. Put that together in Camtasia.

That said though, we do think there's a really great place for short, marketing-oriented pieces that you would make with AppShow, and those would be things like a teaser of your next level that you're working on in your game, or a new feature that you're going to add in the next release where it’s kind of a tighter scope and you can really show that, get in, get out and share that video then on your YouTube channel or you Facebook page, or Twitter, whatever. And those are great media for that, right? Because they're so visual; they're so oriented now towards video and images.

And even imagine for tech support, like how to [inaudible 29:33] things, I guess if your app is so complicated that you need to make a video, then maybe you should be worrying about your app.

I'm thinking of an older YouTube video you'd see of people showing how to do x, y, z, like you could use this to record a video of how to do x, y, z. Can you record videos of any app using the lightning cable, or is it restricted? Can you bounce around between apps and record the interactions, that kind of thing?

It actually will. When you record via the lightning cable, you record whatever you're seeing on the screen. Apple’s very specific about it in app previews that you're showing the home screen and stuff like that, but if you want to do things – showing your grandparents how to get on the wireless –.

I've got those problems trying to get those sort of ideas across; you can do all of that. Anything that you can see on the screen, it shows up through there.

Huh. Has anyone looked at using this that you guys know of for doing, like, screensharing? If you wanted to literally have grandma plug her iOS app into her computer, and then you kind of tell her, “Okay, yup that’s right. Tap up there where it says ‘settings’” or whatever.

We haven’t exactly seen anybody else doing this yet, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn’t something that we had been talking about [chuckling].

Underlying this, what's the actual technological magic? Is it like some open standard that’s moving the video from the device onto Yosemite?

This is something that Apple provided at the system level. There are APIs wrapped around this and, as Daniel said, QuickTime can actually do this right now. If you have a QuickTime player, you can go in and record that so that raw data moving back and forth, it’s coming through as a compressed video stream. I believe it’s actually sort of like a raw .mp4, variable bit rate, H.264 stream that’s coming through there.

Okay, so there's no reason you couldn’t just use AV Foundation or something and take that stream and stream it into something else at the same time.

I think a lot of what we've been trying to do is recognize that the ability to record has been there, whether it’s a better-quality recording and things like that, where we think we can add a whole lot of values to make it so that people can actually do something with those recordings.

People have had camcorders and things like that to be able to make videos, but it’s making something that is useful for someone else to watch that ends up being a lot of the big problem in that.

So one other thing that I'm looking at here is that if it’s just showing what's on my screen, it’s not going to show where I'm tapping.

I was just thinking the exact same thing [chuckles].

So I tapped here, or I swiped here, or I two-finger swiped, or I four-finger swiped or whatever – how do you demonstrate that in the video?

It’s one of the problems that we thought about right away, too. It’s interesting, as the development process moves ahead, you zig and you zag a little bit depending on the emerging needs.

Early on, we thought that’s going to be one of the first things we build in there, is actually a way to visualize touches. We have it in the mockups. It would all have to be after the fact, because Apple isn’t passing across metadata that says, “A touch happened here for this long” or anything like that, so it would have to be manual.

As we looked at where a lot of the videos are, so many of them are games and in a lot of game videos, you actually don’t want to see those touches; it just would be – they'd be so constant that it would be distracting and not helpful. So that’s slipped down a little bit on our radar.

14], and then it will visualize all those touches in real-time. And so then as you capture it, it already has those displayed. It usually displays them as like a grey dot that may be animated; it might have a little outline around it or something along those lines.

Do you have off the top of your head the name of some of those libraries?

Yeah, one of them is called Touchpose. And Mike what's the other one?

I think it was SmudgeKit?

That sounds right.

It sounds like a good name; if I was going to build a library like this, I would use that. Much better than Touchpose – Touchpose is very hard to spell [chuckling].

Well, and it sounds a little bit – I don’t know [chuckling].

Suggestive.

Yeah, that’s the right word.

Yeah, and we had really –.

We have to type that little thing above the ‘e’ as we [crosstalk 33:56].

Yeah, Google is going to get hung up on that, too.

We haven’t dove into those enough to really recommend like, “Oh this one’s way easier to use, or this one looks a lot better,” but we’re sort of just giving some options at this point.

14] for the community, but having a really rich sort of SDK like that that people could put in their apps and then be able to make those videos, that would solve a lot of problems like you mentioned around knowing what's happening on the screen. When change occurs and you're not sure what the person did to make that change happen, it gets so hard to follow the on-screen action.

I can imagine if you're trying to produce a really polished video, these things could get quite annoying because one mis-tap, and it’s going to make an annoying, little jitter on the video. So maybe you want to have some magic that does some smoothing of the movements so that it looks more polished and less like a real user using an application.

One of the things I think helps a little bit with that is this approach where we’re saying, even your 30-second timeline if you will is going to have five different scenes, probably. And so that encourages you to do little, short retakes, and if you're only investing four seconds and it didn’t look that good, we’ll just do it again, and the next time you do it it’ll probably look great.

Is there any other kind of interesting use cases that you guys have heard about people using this video recording technology beyond the app preview? The other thing that occurs to me is using it for recording QA sessions, or recording usability sessions, like recording how someone’s using the application as they're using it so that you can analyze it after the fact.

Those are all possible. One thing to keep in mind is when you're connected with the lightning cable, it feels a little bit [inaudible 35:50]; I assumed we can get all of the – then being able to walk around or use the video, or even necessarily feel exactly how it is in their hands. That is one of the differences when you're using this being tethered to the computer – it’s hard to give up that –. Like you said, 60fps, 1080p video on the iPhone 6 Plus – that’s a lot of nice that you do have that tradeoff.

It is great to get that sort of data, being streaming and recording of video games and stuff like that is another thing that a lot of people have been looking for.

I would say also in education, we’ve heard from some educators – there's this class [inaudible 36:30] in elementary schools and high schools who are like your technology integration specialists. One of their roles is often to discover new apps that could be useful to faculty and students, and then help get those adopted and part of that is explaining why would this be useful, how would this actually function in your class. And so there's that whole educating people about other people’s apps as well beyond just educating people on your apps.

I think there's kind of no end to that. You can imagine – there's the Lynda.com, there's the infinite number of YouTube videos out there that show you how to do things with desktop software and the same thing goes for apps.

That makes sense. Yeah, I guess it’s anywhere where people who have been doing this today with desktop softwares probably apply the same for iOS.

Yeah. Another little thing that I don’t think we’ve explored yet because it’s just so new, there are some interesting apps that you can get for –. Prezi, for example, and some other kind of – animate this on the screen in a really natural, gesture-friendly kind of way. I could see people actually recording some of those segments to then build into another video.

The best way that I can think of to get this point across or show this or illustrate this is this app I happened to have on my iPad. I’ll fire that up; I’ll create the content, draw on the screen whatever it is, and then I’ll put that video and build that into something maybe in my Camtasia or other video software.

This leads me to one other thing – I don’t remember what the name of the app is that I used for this –. Anyway, so when you're recording the video on Yosemite, does it actually show your iPhone display on your computer sort of like AirPlay?

Yes, you do get to see in real-time what's actually displaying. You'll see it at the full 60fps too.

Couldn’t you then use that as – so instead of just recording the presentation if you're screensharing, you can screenshare and show your iPhone as well.

Yup, or putting it up onto – connecting it over to an Apple TV and sharing that out. We have heard of some people wanting to do that sort of idea. Maybe they're already doing a, you have an Apple TV in the classroom or in a meeting room, and then toss this in there, instead of taking over and doing an AirPlay to the Apple TV – sort of keep that context inside a presentation and bring that sort of window up and everything. You can still do some of that, and you don’t even need to be recording it at that point.

Mm-hm.

I can actually see that being used a lot, because it’s always slightly clunky to do the equivalent of unplugging the cable and plugging in the new cable like if you want to switch from AirPlay to presentation, but being able to just flip from a different window and do a showcase of a teacher doing it. A sales pitch or whatever seems like that would be super useful.

For sure.

Or an even more frivolous example – Mike here is getting pretty good at geometry dash, and he’s like, “Hey guys, watch this!” We can just gather around a screen and we don’t have to all watch him trying to play on a little device. We can watch his screen and it’s great [chuckles].

Yeah, if you want to talk about music that’s just killing people, that’s how often I'm crashing in geometry dash while doing recordings, so [chuckling].

It’s a great app for testing AppShow.

I can so see that – somebody’s in there and you're like, “Check this out!” [Chuckling] And there are angry birds and –.

Over and over, yup [chuckling].

Here’s how you beat this boss in this game, yeah.

[Chuckling] Yeah. YouTube is filled with Let’s Play videos that are that, right?

Oh, totally.

We’re just contributing to that, sorry [chuckling].

Well the thing is that you can also then put up a quick video demo. Okay, here’s how in Yosemite, you set up the recording from your iPhone and then if you want to promote your app, then you turn around then you say, “And we’re going to give out some prize for the best video” or something. You can do promotional stuff that way.

I mean, there are so many opportunities that this opens up where it’s relatively seamless you could just make it work.

Yeah, you're right. One of the things that we’ve explored a little bit at TechSmith is helping to kind of get people sharing their content. Honestly, our sweet spot among the market is people who didn’t go to school to learn video editing; they’ve never taken a class in it, maybe, but that’s one of the things they need to do as part of their job.

The last few years we ran a contest called the ScreenChamp Awards, and it was really to get people sharing screencast-style content and having categories, and then we had expert judges, we had a panel of judges that we had. And I could see a lot of that – maybe we need to get a new category for mobile content, or maybe it just competes with everything else, but there's a lot of that sort of getting people who are non-professionals at video to think about how they can level up just a little bit each year so that they're making higher-quality videos. Because honestly, your stuff is out there competing with everything else for people’s attention, and you got to put some quality into it to get those views that you're looking for.

I've got a question that’s kind of a – actually, accidentally a little bit of a plug for TechSmith. There's this product you have called Jing – am I pronouncing that correctly?

That’s it.

Yes.

I love the Jings.

Yeah, and I actually haven’t used this for a few years, but I remember – it’s this thing that lets you kind of just share short videos or screenshots on the web, like super low-friction. I used it a couple of years ago when I had a – the project stakeholder was remote and he was very often unable to make our showcases, so we would just record little two-minute video clips of whatever feature we’d built that week and just kind of send him a link so that he could see what we've been building.

He was a lot more engaged, obviously, seeing this little video rather than reading a boring email saying, “We've added this blah, blah, blah” [chuckling]. When is this going to be integrated with Jing so that I can do the same thing for my iOS apps as I used to do for my web apps?

I guess the question is what would you be missing right now I suppose is the built-in sharing piece, right? That’s what you're referring to with Jing, the hosting?

Yeah, because that really was what made it really low-friction, just like, “here’s a URL I can send to someone and I don’t really have to think about it” was the big win for me.

Yeah, it’s not on our immediate roadmap, but I think it’s an interesting idea, especially with app previews. Obviously, Apple hosts them so that’s not been the focus, but we have had some discussions around, “Are there easy ways to host these in a way, tied into kind of the bigger TechSmith ecosystem of products?”

I have heard from an app developer recently who signed up on our list; it’s been fun to see people come in and hear a little bit about what they're planning to use it for. They’ve said, “I actually want to make these videos as I'm going through the development process,” kind of like you said – for other people on the team, other stakeholders, other team members. They're never going to leave the walls of our company, but we just want to share them internally.

You certainly could do that today with just taking the .mp4 that AppShow generates, but you have to, again, manually pull it into a Dropbox folder or something like that.

I guess you could use the fact that it’s kind of simulcasting when it’s plugged in to Yosemite; it’s kind of simulcasting in a video on Yosemite, so you could just kind of take a screen recording of that video and you're most of the way there, I suppose. It’s probably not going to be as high-quality.

Well, what AppShow gives you is an .mpp, so it would record everything you're doing on your mobile device, and then it would give you an .mp4 of that. And then you would just save that as an .mp4, and if you saved it to, say, your Dropbox folder, it would just sync with everybody immediately.

That’s true.

Yeah, I definitely think that at TechSmith, we definitely recognize that just creating the content isn’t enough. Nobody – well most people – don’t just record their screen or take screenshots with mobile devices now, and just keep those around just for prosperity. They're not just trying to remember what they did four years ago. So I think we’ll definitely see some more things about trying to get those shared easily, not just Jing, but in a lot of our different products. That’s definitely something we’ll be looking into.

That one’s painful for me because Jing was really my baby [chuckling]. But it’s awesome to hear that.

[Crosstalk 44:56] out there.

I appreciate that; that’s awesome to hear.

Yeah, and it’s something as a freelancer, I use all the time with my clients. “Hey, here’s this feature that I did” and it’s a two-minute video and then they could come in and say, “Oh I wanted something different.” But it is relatively seamless because you're just, “Jing, record!” and then it just sends it up automatically.

Yeah, and a lot of people like that it’s not on YouTube. Screencast.com kind of has that privacy level – yeah, it’s in a place where no one’s going to find it. I think of them as disposable videos, so in a lot of cases, you send it to one person, they watch it once, and then they're done.

Yeah, it’s kind of like Skitch for screenshots.

Right.

It’s that simple. Anyway, we’re kind of getting towards the end of our time. I was hoping that I could just get you to summarize maybe the four or five things that you think a good app preview will have in it, or what features that will have period before we wrap up.

I would say, it will have a laser focus on showing the most delightful, the most engaging parts of the app, will have good pacing to kind of not overwhelm people with trying to show too much, or make it hard to follow. I believe it’s going to have music, because I just think – for those who have audio enabled – it just really sets the tone and helps you feel the right feelings about that app.

Finally, if possible, it’s going to have some kind of a storyline. Even though it’s 30 seconds, it’s going to help take you – maybe it’s through a creation process, maybe it’s a social app but it gives you some sense of how this ties into your day-to-day and makes your life better. I think it would be a lost opportunity if you didn’t show some of that.

But then in terms of what elements it’s going to have in it, a lot of that’s restricted by those guidelines, so it’s mostly going to just be consisting of screen video, screen recorded video, the audio and transitions, and maybe some minimal amount of text. That’s kind of what makes it up.

Where are those guidelines? I found a developer’s site that just talks about app previews – is that where I'd find the guidelines as well, or is there a separate place I need to look?

There is a special page that Apple has set up. If you just search Apple App Previews, that has their listing of the guidelines. Early on, even before app previews were being accepted in the store, I worked with a graphic designer and we put together I think a pretty cool infographic that helps distill those into a pretty easy-to-digest format. We could link to those from the show notes, and they're also in that ultimate guide to app previews that I mentioned earlier.

And looking in the old list of App Store guidelines, there's like three or four little bullet points at the end that talk about app previews, so there are some stuff in there but I'm guessing there's more to it than just those three or four points that they have.

So this is the part of trying to get you into trouble. We’re getting close to when Yosemite gets released, but is it stable enough now to install and not cause me major issues when I'm doing my work? Because I really want to play with this, but I really don’t want to be hung up a day, wishing that my computer worked.

I will say that I tend to live bleeding edge and I'm feeling way less pain now than I was before [chuckling] so things are definitely better than Yosemite than where we were at the developer preview one. I actually switched over my home machine to it now, because we actually just saw Beta 4 Public come out and so we’re getting pretty stable at this point now. I think we’re very, very usable, so that’s nice.

Awesome.

You can also dual boot. We've been recommending that for people as another alternative if they really need to keep their production machine on Mavericks to boot into Yosemite. I linked to a Mac World article that kind of walks you through those steps.

And you could just upgrade Mavericks directly into Yosemite and then when they release Yosemite it’ll just upgrade seamlessly?

I don’t know if there are any promises on that one [chuckling]. The iPhone ones, they said a lot how they weren't going to do that and then they did. A lot of people went – they seamlessly upgraded. They’ve been pretty good about – we’re in a whole, new world right now. This isn’t the first time that Apple’s done a public beta of an operating system, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle that. A full-on, just go sign up and you can actually get Beta 3 or a Beta 4 now. That’s a whole different animal, so we’ll see how Apple handles that when the final upgrade happens.

Alright!

Well I'm curious to hear from you guys, what do you think about your apps that you’ve worked on or people that you're friends with? Do you feel like video is accessible as something that you could tackle? What are your thoughts on the cost benefit ratio there?

I kind of agree with what Chuck said at the beginning, it’s like that last 20% that turns out being 80% of the effort for this kind of stuff is marketing, unless you're a big, United Airlines or something, then you do need to persuade people to –. You're in a competition with everyone else on the App Store, so anything that you can do to differentiate yourself seems like a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.

20]; it’s kind of fun to learn a new thing. It’s kind of doing little – playing around video editing to do screencasts before I've had quite a lot of fun with it. It’s like one of those procrastination things; you'll end up doing it because you don’t want to do something else instead.

Yeah, with video, I think I'd be more likely to actually browse in the App Store. Right now I don’t browse in the App Store; I’ll Google something, what app should I get. By the time I go to the App Store I know what app I want to download, but if I had the ability to view some videos, that might make more sense if I'm just kind of browsing around like, which app to do x am I looking for. If I can see some previews or video, that might make the browsing experience a little more reasonable, at least for me.

Yeah, and I think the other thing is that sometimes I'm going and I'm like – just to throw an example out; this isn’t something I've really searched for even though I have about six apps that do it – my to-do list. You get on, it’s like, “Okay, well do I want this to-do list app or this other to-do list app?” And I'm not really sure which one to pick, and so I really like the ability to go in and look at it and go, “Hey, this works this way; this one works this way. I can see how they kind of set it up. They're telling a good story about the app” and so you can differentiate yourself; you can make it so that it’s the obvious choice to pick up your app.

Obviously that takes some planning and some know-how as far as putting together a marketing video, but 30 seconds gives you at least a chance to show them that you're the one that they want. And the other thing is I really wouldn’t be shocked if it does turn into an “Only show me apps that have the app preview in them.” The reason I say that is it’s sort of like Amazon where I only want the ones that I can ship prime, or in iTunes, we found that podcasts do way better if they have nicelooking album art than if they don’t, and so I think this is going to turn into kind of that thing where if it has a good-looking icon on it, if it has a good set of reviews on it and you can go and watch the preview, you can get a really good idea as to whether or not the app is worth getting. I really think it’s going to make a big difference.

The thing that I'm really hoping Apple does though is if you go and look up an app that brings up the iTunes page that shows you the app and some of the photos and stuff on the web, I want that preview in there so that people can go and watch it on the web instead of having to watch it on their device. If they do that, I think it will totally change the game as far as picking up a particular app.

I think that would be great, but I suspect – knowing video on the web – that Apple will do it so that it works great on Safari and that’s it [chuckling].

Yeah, probably.

Download the videos as .mov and play them locally [laughter].

Right, exactly.

Yeah, that’ll work for the other three tech people who are looking at my app.

And I feel like along those lines there's kind of a missed opportunity for embedding those videos as well. Imagine if – I've been trying to curate on Tumblr a list of videos that you can actually watch if you don’t have an iOS 8 device. Some people are sharing them on YouTube or on Vimeo, and so I've been pulling those together into a Tumblr blog.

Imagine if you could just make your own kind of discovery pages of apps just based on those videos and they are actually pulled from the App Store – I could see that being a really great way to discover new apps very quickly.

Well I could also see – I'm always looking at, “Gee, what other show could I put together?” But I could see putting together just a little marketing thing that’s about marketing your iOS app and so it’d be a really focused show and it would be the best app previews out there. It would be the 30second preview, and then 30 seconds of “these are the killer points, this is what they did well in this.” And we wouldn’t belabor it a lot, but it would just be a real quick, “they told a great story from this to this, and this really demonstrated this feature well” and basically line up all of the good points about it. That way, people, in a minute, could go in, watch the video, get the reducts, and then know what they ought to do on their app previews.

Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I've started doing a little bit of that analysis on the TechSmith blog, rounding up even on the first day these were in the store, here are 15 examples. I like to break it down, and like you said, do some analysis because I think that’s helpful to say, “Here’s what you could steal from this” essentially.

Oh, absolutely. And I think there's going to be a whole science around this, kind of like SEO.

Well let me know if you want me to come back and we can do that show [chuckling]. I could invite a couple of other friends.

It’s interesting – there's a couple other people that have definitely been ear to the ground on this stuff. Dan Counsell has a good article as you'd expect and there's a guy named Joe Cieplinski – he has a podcast as well; it’s called ReleaseNotes.TV. He presented a 360iDev about the topic.

There's kind of a few of us that are spending a lot of time thinking about best practices for these videos.

So now I'm distracted looking at your blog post and watching all of these videos of different apps [chuckling].

Yeah, it is fun to see. It’s a constrained medium, and I like to say constraints are one of the things that lead to that bound of creativity, that genius, and so it’s fun to see just how people create such different videos within this 30-second format, with all these rules about what you can’t put in it.

Yeah, yeah. It is actually really interesting; it’s going to be an exciting period watching everyone figure out what works and what doesn’t and come up with these wacky different ways of showing why their app is awesome.

Yeah, for sure.

I'm sure it won't be long until we start seeing what early web, the equivalent of the blink tag and all that sort of stuff too [laughter].

There's one video I called out in that roundup of 15 posts that, I kid you not, has a cat’s paw in it.

Somehow it passed through review [chuckling].

[Laughs] That sounds like a new sport: what can you get through app review? [Laughter] Subliminal messages – now here’s what I'm going to do: I'm going to figure out a way to insert subliminal messages into the video telling the reviewer that my app shall pass review. These are not the droids you're looking for [laughter].

There you go.

I kid you not, that in conversations that we’ve had, that was called out as one thing you were explicitly not allowed to do. Subliminal messaging is one of those pieces.

Oh really?

That was direct from Apple, which we were very interested to hear that that was something that they felt needed to be making sure, that people weren't going to go that route [chuckling].

“Buy this app. Buy this app. Buy this app.”

Or sneaking in little, tiny promotions for your other apps even when you're not supposed to, right?

Yeah. That's a good question: can you do that with the free app? Can you say, “Go to this URL to get the paid one, which is even more awesome”?

You're not supposed to promote other apps in it, though what you can do is show in-app purchase content and you have to a little label on there that says, “In-app purchase required.” You can do that, but all within the same app. Yeah, they really – I don’t know how strictly that’s being enforced, but I haven’t seen any videos that made it through that pretty overtly advertised a different app.

Yeah, but you can, I'm sure, show integration points. In order to use Dropbox for example, you have to have the Dropbox app installed. I would assume that you can say, “And you can share on Dropbox” or “And it automatically connects to Dropbox in this way.”

Yeah. I think it’s mainly if you go real deep into that, like opening another app or going to the home screen – that is problematic.

Ah, I see. Alright well let’s go ahead and get to our picks. Before we do really quickly, I know that you guys said that you are working on that product. Do you want to give us the one-minute pitch – what it is and where we can get it or get more information about it? Because I think it is a good tool for folks who are going to want to do this kind of thing, moving forward.

Sure, yeah. The elevator pitch for TechSmith AppShow is that it is a better way and easier way for people to create – not just the 30-second app preview videos that can now live in the iTunes environment in the App Store, but also longer format videos that will help train, help market your app, or even teach people about an app that you didn’t build.

What's unique about it really is that we’ve tried to give you a different way to think about structuring content, and instead of recording a ton of content and then having to chop it up and arrange it and take a lot of time on that, we've tried to make it so that as you're recording, you're also structuring and picking the best bits, maybe doing quick retakes, and your video is being built as you go through the recording process. The goal being that someone who’s an app developer who’s like, “I'm great at coding; I'm great at that but I'm just not into marketing” could just pick up AppShow and get started with it really quickly, and be able to make a video that they're proud of.

I this Mac only, or is it Windows too?

It is Mac only – Yosemite only – and that’s only because that’s how Apple has engineered things. That's the only way to directly capture the iOS 8 device, is through that lighting cable hooked into a Mac running Yosemite.

Good to know.

Alright. Well let’s go ahead and do the picks! Pete, do you want to start us off with picks?

Sure, why not? My first pick is going to be TechSmith’s website being very impressively responsive. While I was clicking around here, I started dragging the screen. You guys have done a really good job with making a website that is super easy to read on desktop and when it gets small it just works on iPad and iPhone. Great job; it’s really good to see a website that works really well on devices without having to do ndoc.txt with dot, comma, whatever.

Well thank you so much. We have a team that’s been doing a lot of work on that in the last weeks and months to make it that way so they’ll be very flattered to hear that.

Good. My next pick is a product called WhatTheFont! which I had to use the other day for reasons I don’t want to go into. But it’s pretty magical technology; you send it a picture of some text and it tells you what makes a good guess at what the font is. [Inaudible 01:01:02] if you have, for example, a design team that doesn’t want to actually talk to you or tell you what font you're using – hypothetically [chuckling].

I love that.

Which would never happen in real life [chuckling]

Ugh, designers.

And my last pick is the fun you can have with Remote Control Helicopters. The other day – and by other day I actually mean a couple of years ago; this has been on my pick list for a couple of years – I bought those remote control helicopters that you can get on Amazon for $11 or something ridiculous, and these things are really fun to play with, particularly if you have some small children or cats. And it’s super easy to control; they last about five minutes, but they're really good fun. They're really good fun if you get a few of them and have races, so if you're in an open-planned office, then they're a good investment to use after work hours, because otherwise you might [inaudible 01:01:50]. Those are my picks.

Alright Jaim, what are your picks?

Okay, I've got one pick. A week or two ago, some guy released an announcement that he created a language that’s a superset of Common Lisp and it’s compiled by LLVM. I thought that was pretty cool. I don’t think it’s available for iOS – I don’t think anyone’s built it on iOS yet, but it will run on Linux or Mac. But it seems pretty cool, so if you're a Common Lisp person – which I'm not really, but I like to think I might be – now you can play with it on LLVM and your Mac apps, possibly.

Aspirational Lisp user.

Yeah. That is my pick. Clasp is the name of the library.

Awesome. I'm going to go ahead and share something that I actually built this last week. I had some help; I was pairing with somebody when we did it, but anyway. First off, on the Freelancers’ Show, we talked to a fellow named Kurt Elster, and he was talking about some tiny webpages that he had put together that made him a little bit of a residual income, but more than that, it just sounded like fun. And so I put together my own – it’s called todayisasuccess.com. I’ll put links to the Freelancers’ Show episode and to the page in the show notes.

Basically what it is, is I like to work off the premise “If I get just one more thing done today, what would it be?” to make my day a success, and so you basically fill in the field and you say, “So today would be record iPhreaks” and so I put that in there. When I'm done, I’ll click the button and that adds it to today’s successes, which is a list that's right underneath that field.

Anyway, it was just way fun because I got to build out this cool, little deal and then I put it together, and I built it out with AngularJS and Sinatra. It doesn’t really do a whole lot, but for me it’s just, “Oh okay, I've got this one, little thing that I'm going to do and I'm going to get it done.” So anyway, todayisasuccess.com. I'm probably going to put some ads on it, but not a ton – just to support the hosting costs and stuff. But anyway, those are my picks.

Daniel, what are your picks?

One of the things that I've been doing on the team is helping to build our list. Like any good, new product, we have a landing page up even before we had a product. As I shopped around for where to host that or what tool to use, I was really interested in KickoffLabs, and so that’s what we chose. One of the killer features of it – it’s going to sound a little creepy – is you just type your email address into the form to sign up on the page, and somehow it goes and fetches your different social handles. It knows who you are on Twitter, on LinkedIn; it pulls in a little bio based on that public information.

What's great about that is that I can get some sense as we’re getting these signups of who’s signing up, who they are. I can pull up their LinkedIn and then reach out to them as I want to maybe try to get a conversation going with them, maybe think about, “Is this a good customer story down the road?” or someone who could – we could help each other. So that’s one.

And then on the frivolous side, I've been spending a little bit too much time today with a couple of animated gif new products. The one is PopKey; it’s the new animated gif keyboard, so you can – just for kicks – talk in animated gifs in text.

The other is Jibjab Messages, which just came out yesterday. I found that on Product Hunt. That’s pretty fun because you can take you or somebody else’s face and put it into an animated gif.

Very cool. Michael, what about you? Do you have some picks for us?

I do. I pretty much have two lives – one is, I'm a soccer dad, because that’s pretty much what five out of my seven days a week are, and the other is I'm a geek. The first one feels a little bit selfserving, but Coach’s Eye is another thing that we make here at TechSmith, which is about being able to record video and break it down on the mobile apps – iPhone and pretty much every mobile device. I use it with my kids with soccer all the time – literally almost every day of the week. I record them taking a kick and then show them where it is that they're having problems. That’s my first pick.

Second one, to really fulfill that geek part of it, Screenhero. You were talking earlier about pairing out with people; I absolutely love it. One of our devs is not in the office and we actually often have people that are remote, and Screenhero has got to be one of the best remote screensharing. Both can take control of the screen, you can see the other person’s cursor and everything – it is one of the best working environments for trying to do dev pairing, or even just being able to walk people through issues on the other machine. It’s absolutely phenomenal.

Yeah, it’s a terrific tool. They recently went Pro or paid, and it’s still totally worth it

Yup.

So go support them and go buy it. Alright, well thanks for coming guys. If people want to get a hold of you or follow-up on this conversation directly, what are the best ways to do that?

They can find out more about AppShow at appshow.techsmith.com, and then they can contact the team by email if they want to go old school, it’s appshow@techsmith.com, or when on Twitter @appshowapp. When you're not the first one to get the handle, the one you want is already taken.

Alright, well thanks for coming and we’ll catch everyone next week!