I ran across the ScreenCastle service the other day and wanted to blog about it. ScreenCastle offers a free Java-based screencast recording solution. What separates it from other solutions is there's no installation required—other than accepting the Java cert when the applet loads.
It's definitely not as feature rich as Camtasia or Jing, but it will serve the most basic purposes for recording.
Where it really shines is as a tool for debugging a customer's problem. They don't need any other software installed, they just go to the ScreenCastle website and click on the big red button and record away. When their done recording, the video gets pushed to the ScreenCastle server and then provides the user with links, embed code, etc—which they can then e-mail to you.
The service is offered by Skoffer—who has published some information on their limited API. They show some examples on how you can integrate the service into a Wiki or Blogging service (such as WordPress.)
I'd love it if they opened up the API a little more, so that you could potentially push the content to private servers (or at least be able to download a published file and then remove it from their servers.)
Anyway, this is a great tool if you want to be able to have a customer record what they're doing on the screen and send you a video of it.
Mike Jones just publish an article on Reconnecting Flex Builder Plug-in To Eclipse—which shows how to move an installation of your Flex Builder Plug-in to a new installation of Eclipse without having to uninstall/install. His instructions are for Mac OSX, but it looks as if they might be virtually the same for windows.
Below are Mike's original instructions.
- Install a fresh copy of eclipse, but don't delete the old version yet. (I called mine eclipse-new, you can rename it at the end)
- Copy start_fb.jar to the root of your new eclipse installation
- Copy the Flex Builder link file com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.osx.link to the "links" folder in the root of your new eclipse installation (If you are using Ganymede - 3.4 or greater you'll need to create this folder)
- Open up the bundles.info file located in you old eclipse installation/configuration/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator in a text editor
- Copy all of the Flex Builder related entries - use the file reference as a guide as not all of the packages have Flex in the name
- Now open up the same file, but in your new installation and paste those entries at the top and save it
- Start up your new clean eclipse install and bask in your 1337 s1<i||z :p
- If all went to plan you can now close eclipse, delete the old version and rename the new one - job done.
While I haven't tested this, it looks like this should work in Windows with the exception being the "link" file is actually named com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link in Windows.