Screen Recording for free
I was helping a client out with a problem yesterday. They had a spot in their web application where an Ajax request was made and the browser would hang. They could not do anything in the browser until the request had completed -- despite the fact that it was an asynchronous request.
After setting up VPN software so I could connect directly to their webservers and poke around, I was unable to reproduce the problem. I fixed a small CSS bug in relation to a progress message, but that was just cosmetic. Even without the fix, my browser would not hang during the Ajax request. I even added a forced delay in the Ajax request by doing a Thread.Sleep(5000) -- no difference. I could continue to enter data while the Ajax request was doing its thing.
I bouced a few emails back and forth with the client but I really wanted to show them it was working as they had designed. An online meeting wouldn't work since the refresh was a little too slow to appreciate what was going on. I had used Camtasia Studio many, many years ago for some product documentation, but I don't currently own it. I decided I'd look and see if there was an open source/free alternative for my simple needs.
I came across CamStudio. This looked like exactly what I was looking for. On the CamStudio site, I found a link to the Official CamStudio blog. While browsing the entries, I came across this:
Sure, 3.1 is a very old version, but I read the directions, followed the links and within an hour or so had a fully legal (licensed from TechSmith) version of Camtasia Studio! Spent about 10 minutes figuring out how to capture and less than 30 minutes later had sent off a small AVI to the client showing them how it works on my machine. They were impressed (and excited) to see the app running as it was intended!
I still downloaded CamStudio but haven't installed it yet. It's on my to-do list...