Screen recorder saved me

The software I used for the tablet reviews (Slice) is capable of saving the result in an xml file, including every single stroke on every file. I wrote about this previously.

It turns out that this only works about half the time, the other times the saved version looks like this:

I saw this for the first time after I was done with all the experiments and started tallying the results. It frightned me a little – potentially half of my experiments would have to be scrapped if I couldn’t access this data.

Luckily I used another program – BBFlashBack to make flash recordings of the entire screen for each review session. Playing it back at 4x speed allowed me to record comments as accurately as if they were on paper, and also I remembered things that I would have forgotten if I didn’t have the recording.

I will give them some free promotion here – this is a most excellent screen recorder. I tried a few and this is the only one that will:

  • Run smoothly on an older computer
  • Record with a very decent framerate
  • Make reasonably small flash files

I was so happy that I had these recordings – I even wanted to buy the full version, but at 90$ it’s a bit too expensive for me.