Another Round of Screenjelly Updates

As always, the Screenjelly team has been working hard on bringing you great new features, and our newest round of updates is now live!

Here are the details:

• You can now post descriptions for every recording, not just the ones you tweet. And even better yet, you can now edit one of your recordings’ descriptions from its player page!
• We made it possible to sign in to Screenjelly with Facebook Connect, so you can now use Screenjelly with your Facebook account, your Twitter account or a Screenjelly account with email and password!
• We continued improving our useful bookmarklet and Screenjelly button.
• We hunted down and killed dozens of those nasty bugs that have been hanging around Screenjelly.
• And finally, we laid the groundwork for some very cool things to come soon…

We hope you like today’s changes and, as usual, we’d be happy to hear from you on Twitter at @AskScreenjelly, by email at ask@screenjelly.com, or through the Screenjelly Helpdesk.

Extract from “The Mac Geek Gab” podcast by Dave Hamilton and John Braun of The Mac Observer.

Full episode available here.

Thanks for the mention Dave and John!

How to Cash Out Your Tips

We’re discontinuing Screenjelly’s Tipjoy integration, but you can still cash out your old tips!

If you’ve received a tip in the past, head over to Tipjoy to create an account. Once you’ve created an account, you’ll be able to see how just how much money you’re owed (or, in less enjoyable cases, how much you owe).

If more than $5 is waiting for you in Tipjoy (tips aren’t available to you until tippers actually pay Tipjoy), you’ll see a “cash out” button at the top-right corner of every Tipjoy page you visit. Tipjoy will explain the rest!

Let us know what you think about us removing Tipjoy from Screenjelly, or if you need help with anything, in the comments, by sending a tweet to @AskScreenjelly or at the brand new Screenjelly Helpdesk.

Meet the Screenjelly Helpdesk

Screenjelly’s latest update includes the Screenjelly Helpdesk, a center for help, troubleshooting, support, and discussion. The helpdesk has swallowed up our old feedback system and our Help and Troubleshooting pages, and we’re confident it will make Screenjelly a better experience for everyone.

Our old Help page has been turned into a section in the helpdesk’s discussions: The Basics. You can leave comments directly on each help article there—whether you found a mistake or you have a question, we look forward to your input.

Similarly, our old Troubleshooting page has been moved to the helpdesk, albeit with the same name: Troubleshooting. We invite you to leave comments on those articles as well.

The center of the helpdesk is support requests. The Screenjelly Helpdesk will make it easier for us to respond to your questions quickly and well. Our favorite new feature in the helpdesk is that if you submit a great request, we’ll be able to post it (and our response) in the public Discussions area where it’ll be able to help everyone.

The helpdesk has much, much more than we’ve covered here, but the best way to really find out what’s so special about it is to head over!

More Big Updates to Screenjelly!

We at Veodia have been busier than ever over the last few weeks working on some big new things for Screenjelly!

There’s no better way to see the new features than to head over to Screenjelly, but here’s a breakdown of everything new to Screenjelly:

• We made it possible to sign up for Screenjelly with just your name and email—Twitter’s optional now!
• We removed the tipping, “I Like,” and reply features, since very few people were using them, and we want to prevent Screenjelly from becoming bloated.
• We created the Screenjelly Helpdesk to serve as a better center for your Screenjelly needs.
• We created some game-changing tools—a bookmarklet and a portable Screenjelly button.
• We added a demo recording to our homepage to welcome new-comers.
• We’ve started asking users for their email addresses during registration so we can contact you about cool new stuff going on with Screenjelly. (You’ll only receive newsletters if you opt-in, of course.)
• We also squashed dozens of bugs and tweaked nearly every page or feature in one way or another to help make Screenjelly an even better experience for everyone.

Let us know what you think about all the new features, or if you need help with anything, in the comments, by sending a tweet to @AskScreenjelly or at the brand new Screenjelly Helpdesk.

Twitter Hit by Denial-of-Service Attack

Twitter is being “attacked” today in what is called a “denial-of-service attack.” The site went down for some time in the morning, but is back up now. Unfortunately, they are still experiencing issues with their API, which is making it temporarily impossible to use many of Screenjelly’s features.

You can currently view recordings and get video URLs and embed codes, but you cannot upload recordings or tweet or email them.

We’ll update you as soon as things are fully functional again.

Update (8/7/09 at 2:30pm): Screenjelly is back up and running as normal! Twitter was still under attack this morning (see their update), but they seem to be on their way to a full recovery.

We managed to tweak the way our service interacts with Twitter, so Screenjelly should be fully functional now! We’re still keeping an eye on the system to make sure everything is working smoothly on our side. Thanks for your understanding and patience!

Rad On The Web – Episode 14 →

Rad On The Web’s latest episode talks about Screenjelly (starting at 2:36 into the video), and even invites viewers to send in recordings of themselves talking about cool web applications—they’ll consider posting the best ones!

Tame the Web – Screencasting to an Audience of One →

Mick Jacobsen (@mickjacobsen), a librarian, tells us about how he helps and connects with his patrons using Screenjelly for “an audience of one.” That’s the kind of librarian we want in our libraries!

Uhelà – ScreenJelly.com, the site that lets you create videos of their activities to the computer to share on Twitter →

Original Italian Version

Our First Batch of Screenjelly Updates!

Thank you for all the feedback since we launched Screenjelly! It has been a very exciting launch, and we love hearing back from you! We have been reading all of this great feedback and are launching some updates that answer many of your requests.

We are very interested in learning what you are using Screenjelly for, what you’ve loved, what you’ve hated, and what would make Screenjelly even better for you. We created a Twitter account just for your feedback and your support questions: @AskScreenjelly. Please use it to let us know what you think!

Some of the changes:

• We created this blog, because 140 characters really is not always enough.
• We made some changes to the way we present the concept of private recordings.
• We fixed a bug that caused Screenjelly to show alerts that Flash Player and/or Java were not installed on users’ computers when they actually were.
• We fixed a bug that broke Screenjelly in Safari for users with the Flip4Mac plug-in installed.

And you’ll especially like these ones:

• We greatly improved the quality of audio on recordings.
• We worked out the ability to embed screen recordings wherever you want.

Also, some of you were confused on why you needed to sign in with Twitter to use features completely unrelated to Twitter. While you still have to, we think we now do a better job explaining why you are redirected to Twitter. And don’t worry, we’ll be adding other ways to sign in soon!

Finally, we understand that some of you were frustrated that we made you follow @Screenjelly without asking, so we made this optional. We realize making you follow us without any warning wasn’t the right thing to do. The reason we originally did this was to make it easier for us to reach out to you if you need any help, and we still encourage you to follow us—some future features may even require it!

Expect some more big things from Screenjelly in the near future!