Qarbon Viewletbuilder: Imagine the power of screenshots

In the next few days, I shall be reviewing Screencasting software. This is part I of the series where I present my first hand experience of Qarbon Viewletbuilder.

Qarbon Viewletbuilder is a software for creating software demos (Screencast), online courses (e-learning) and sophisticated SCORM compliant instructional material without requiring any knowledge of complex Macromedia Flash authoring environment. So even non-technical managers can create tutorials and demos quickly and easily.

ViewletBuilder’s authoring mechanism allows users to take snapshots of the screen while recording the demo. Each screen capture is accompanied with a camera shutter sound and is represented as a slide in a timeline (similar to Powerpoint program). Here you give finishing touches to the slides and then compile them to produce an engaging and interactive Flash simulation.

Since compiled viewlets are Macromedia Flash files, all the benifits of SWF files are inherently present in Viewlets like streaming, greater accessibility, easily distributable, small file size, better audio integration and compatible with even PDA’s and Pocket PC’s.

You can use ViewletCam in combination with Viewletbuilder to create dynamic content with full-motion video recording from your PC screen. While ViewletBuilder’s patented screen capture method works like a digital camera, ViewletCam’s recording process works like a digital camcorder.

Viewlets are not just limited to software simulations or software tutorials. You can find a million other uses:

1. A Macromedia Breeze alternative - You can use Viewletcam to record your powerpoint presentations with mouse movements and voice narration, save it to a flash .swf file and stream it on the web or local intranet.

2. Your very personal Flickr badge - Create a slideshow of your family pictures and embed the flash file on your weblog page.

3. Keep track of your child’s internet surfing habits - Keep running Viewletcam in the background in Record Mode and then create a movie of your children online activities.

4. Your manual System Restore utility - If you are planning to make some major changes to your Registry or your PC audio settings, record your actions - Incase some disaster happens, you can just replay the movie and undo the steps.

5. Real estate agents can use Viewlets to provide a virtual “walk-through” of a home (professional-looking virtual home tours) for prospective buyers.

See related story: Screencasting to help your mom.

Qarbon offers the full version of ViewletBuilder for 30 days, but the viewlets created in the Trial version will have a superimposed watermark until you pay for the licensed version, which will remove them. Qarbon has an impressive list of customers including ADP, JCPenny, Sun, Oracle, Sony, Alias and UPS.

And Qarbon knows how easy it to use Viewletbuilder, they don’t ship any local help file with the software - And believe me, you won’t ever need it - the Viewlet authoring tool is that simple to use and exciting to work with.

The Viewletbuilder application is written in Java so the program runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and now it’s also available on the Mac OSX.

Download Viewlet Builder at: http://www.qarbon.com/download/index.html (Current Version: ViewletBuilder 4.4.4, ViewletCam 1.7)