LittleSnapper Overview

Click to Play

A run through of the LittleSnapper application from www.realmacsoftware.com . This application is new as of Nov 2008 and helps you to take great snap shots of your desktop and anything on it, web page snaps that contain the full length of the current page and more. You can annotate, crop, share and utilized any image for just about anything you can think of. The image sharing site; QuickSnapper use comes with the application.

FormLoom - first impressions screencast

<--- Click On Image for Movie (movies may take a moment to load, due to increased traffic)

At last there is a great plugin addition from YabDab aptly named FormLoom.

In a nutshell this RapidWeaver plugin creates a great looking contact form with reCaptcha in a snap. This short screencast covers setting up a form.
Please note that this is the first beta release and I am looking forward to improvements and the eventual full release . There is already quite a hot thread on this plugin over at the Realmac forums.

Oh, and YabDab are discounting the beta sign-up by $2 so grab the plugin at a good price more details over at the Forum Announcement thread .

Just a reminder we are running our promo on supportcasts 12 months membership and BlueBall Designs Theme bundle in our Blog Thread too , catch it while you can.

New Cast on Text Shadows Available

Have you ever wanted create nice looking drop shadow effects on you text? You can, with some caveats....

A new SupportCast is now available to Members covering the text-shadow: selector for CSS.

Not all browsers support this but CSS 3.0 has it with the ability to be inherited. Fortunately it degrades gracefully so you text will look just fine in the browsers that don't support it, yet.

We also show the use of @Stash from http://www.nilrogsplace.se for keeping code handy for your site project within that project.

This one is Members Only.

08 Holiday Promo - beat those economic doldrums

Lets get into the Holiday Spirit and beat those economic blues.

Supportcasts have teamed up with BlueBall Design on a fantastic double whammy promotion from now till Dec 25th 2008.

First of all for this holiday period SupportCasts have lowered our 12 month subscription by $15 already a saving of 19%

But we did say this was a double whammy deal with BlueBall design and we are exclusively offering a superb BlueBall Design Theme bundle.

The Blueball Theme Bundle Vol. 1 bundle includes the following great looking themes:
• Blueball Pro Colors
• Blueball Classic Colors
• Blueball Kamino Classic
• Blueball Comments
• Blueball Showcase
• Blueball Designer Colors
The list price for all of these combined costs a total $66.00.

We have arranged for a 30% special discount price of just $46.00, a savings of $20. This Theme bundle is only available exclusively through SupportCasts.com till Dec 25th 2008

But the holiday madness does not stop there. In addition to the above special deal we also offer to all purchasers of the BlueBall Theme Bundle an additional $15 coupon off a SupportCasts.com 12 month membership. 

Combined with our promo price you can snap up a 12 month membership for the price of 6 months ($49.95), a fantastic saving of 38% on our regular price $79.95.

Existing supportcasts members can pick up this Theme bundle at the Discount price too

* Offer is valid from 23rd Nov 2008 - Dec 25th 2008 existing supportcasts members can purchase the Theme bundle without use of the BlueBall $15 coupon code. Promo and coupon codes mentioned above apply only to the 08 Holiday promo product only. All rights reserved SupportCasts.com

Promo coming soon

Feeling the credit crunch during this spell of economic crisis , we are going to launch a promo in a few days that will keep your piggy-bank happy too :)

Common questions on RapidWeaver Themes - screencasts

One of the reasons Supportcasts.com came into existence was to help Mac users quickly and more easily understand how to work on their Macs. After spending almost spending almost 3 years answering questions on the Rapidweaver Forum and getting to know some of the Theme Developers we decided to ask one of them; "what are the most commonly asked questions you receive?"

Charlie Lockhart over at Blueball Design was the first to receive our question. We got a great set of questions back. Oh yeah, Charlie would know. He has been building themes for Rapideweaver for almost 4 years!

We have created a 2 part cast covering these questions and giving answers for Rapidweaver users. These are not only for Blueball Design themes, but for many other themes created for Rapidweaver.

If you are new to Rapidweaver or even if you've been using it for a while, we hope you will find something that will help you here. And maybe Charlies inbox will be a bit smaller tomorrow....

Did we mention the Coupon Code? We have a great offer of $3 off of the new Blueball Design theme for Rapidweaver; RW Pro Tabs 4.0. Simply watch any or all of the movies and you will find the code at the end to use to get this quality theme at a discount. Hurry, this offer ends on December 25, 2008.

Movie One:
All the questions except the ones on Blocks and Themes (see the second movie for Blocks information)

Movie Two:
Blocks and common errors with Themes

Feedback button

We have now implemented a new feedback/suggestion box solution for all our vistors.
You can use it by clicking on the small Orange tab to the left of the page

We also have other categories available at the main feedback page

iWeb and BannerZest - Flash Banner How To

It has been a while since we have offered a free show over at SupportCasts.com so here we go for today , yay.
This time we have taken a different direction and offered a show covering for what is generally the first website creation application you get when you buy/switch to a Mac and that is iWeb.

Whilst most people can use iWeb for their general needs , we have covered integrating a Flash Banner into iWeb for fun and to show that it is possible to just push iWeb a bit further :)

Basic requirements are iWeb 08 from Apple iLife Suite and Bannerzest from Aquafadas.
Enjoy and watch out for more shows on additional Mac applications

New Cast - Creating an Vignette Effect - Pixelmator

A new Cast on Pixelmator, our first cast on this application, is now up. This Cast show you how to create a nice vignette affect in just a few simple steps. 

This is what the finished image looks like.

Happy Halloween Everyone

Just a reminder that our Specials are ending tonight at midnight. Both the YourHead Plugins Discount and the SupportCasts.com introductory pricing are ending.

To get in on the YourHead discount simply watch our Free Cast on Blocks Master Pages or, if you are a Member, watch any of the Blocks Casts to get the information on how to get 15% of the Plugins.

To get a full 13 months of access to SupportCasts.com for only $49.95 USD simply join before midnight tonight. After the "witching hour" comes our regular pricing takes effect.

We have some great casts in the works for release early next week. 

New screencasts online for RapidWeaver & Sandvox

A busy week here at our respective geographic locations and the video tutorials keep on coming :)

Our resident RW gurus ;) have produced an additional Rapidweaver video tutorial to create unique nav bar image links. If you wanted ever wanted to know how to have custom navigation bar images, then this is for you.

On the Sandvox front, we have also wrapped up the following screencasts this week

- Contact Form Basics for Sandvox

- JW Flash Player Integration in your Sandvox pages (this is going to be spread over a couple of casts to include some more features of JW player)

We also dusted off a video that was is covered in our recent server migration, and it is a real beauty :)

- Sandvox e-commerce using e-Junkie. This gives you a real painless and slick looking e-commerce solution.

Go check these new screencast additions out in our member pages.

Last of all, if you are not yet a member of SupportCasts , what's stopping you? You still have until the end of October 2008 to sign up with our special offer pricing that is just insane :D

All the best from the SupportCasts team

New Casts Available

Two new casts area available today. RW035 and RW036. 

RW035 shows you how to use CSS to style your RW Contact Form.

RW036 is about adding custom images to your Navbar.

These have been added to the iTunes Feed for Members as well as the Membership Area online.

The next cast will show you how to have a custom image for each Navbar Link and how to customize them to make each one unique.

Just 2 weeks left to take advantage of our super discount Membership or 13 months at only $49.95. We also have a 6 Month option for $39.95.

Support Isaiah over at Yourhead by grabbing up all the plugins you can at 15% off. All you have to do is watch the Blocks Master Pages Cast located in this Blog to get the coupon code. This Cast is available to all, not just Members! 

A big THANKS goes out to all our early adopters. We appreciate your confidence in us. 

Special Membership Offer Extended

Over the past week we have moved to a new server that will help better serve up videos, speed up login and other needed upgrades. This process caused some downtime for our new site as well as some challenges to new Member signups.

The SupportCasts Team has decided to extend the initial offer of $49.95 for 13 months of access and unlimited video viewing for a few more weeks. We will now keep this special introductory offer going until 12:01 November 1, 2008.

Now that the "dust has settled" we are on task to create more great video tutorials for you. You can expect to see many new casts arriving consistently over the next few weeks and onward.

Remember, our YourHead.com special discount offer runs until the same time our introductory offer does. Simply view the short Cast on MasterPages in our public Blog and find the discount code or, if you are a Member, view any of the Blocks Casts in the Member Area to get this code.

We hope you will take advantage of our Membership Discount before November 1st so you can have access to all the current and upcoming Casts for the next 13 months!

Sign Up Now and Save!

The SupportCasts.com Team

Sign Up Issues resolved

A hectic night trying to iron out the sign up issues, and I think we have it solved. I have made sign up tests here on a number of plans and it is sending emails correctly .

Have a nice weekend 

Regards

 

Sign up problems - Oh no not again - Oh Yes!!!

Yes, it sounds like we are back at square one over 4 weeks ago with sign up problems, we have contacted the billing software supplier to see what is going on. 

If there is no satisfactory response and solution by Sunday evening, alternative arrangements will be made to handle the sign up  payments to supportcasts.

In the meantime the special offer deadline will be extended by another week.

Thanks in advance for your patience while we sort this out.

We are back

Well the site upgrade took a little bit longer than expected , then we had some problems with our billing database that did not behave itself on the new hardware.

All that is left are some page and plug-in updates, these will happen in the background.

You can be assured we will not be doing that exercise for quite a long while :)

Regards

Site upgrade - kicks off tonight

We are going ahead with the upgrade tonight (8th October) , we are planning to start from 11pm-midnight Eastern Time. All member and sign up pages will be turned off just beforehand so we can retrieve a clean backup.

We estimate the migration and testing work to take around 2-3 hours although you can never tell with the DNS updates.  

Thanks for your understanding and support 

Site update - coming soon

This is a quick heads up to let you know that we will be doing a major site upgrade (moving servers and databases) over the coming days. Screencasts, Pages and member pages will be affected during the upgrade and however to minimise any long outages we plan to do this in one shot (fingers crossed). 

We have not scheduled a firm date but timing will probably take place from midnight Eastern time  , we do apologise in advance to our European subscribers. The DNS propagation will take the most time in this process.

Emails will be sent out to current members with more details over the next couple of days.

Regards

Contact Form Styling New Cast

A new screencast is now online in the members area:
For all of you who have had trouble formatting your stock RapidWeaver Contact Form page with CSS , we walk you through the steps on how to do this :)

CSSEdit and RapidWeaver Screencast

New in the members area is a great tutorial covering CSSEdit and Rapidweaver.

In case you do not know what CSSEdit is :) It is a great application (made in Belgium :D ) from MacRabbit. Packed with a powerful live preview mode that helps you modify Style-Sheets in no time at all, go check it out if you have not done so already.

New information in Members Area

As well as the useful content tags. We have also included a full search function on all pages and video postings but it does not stop there.... We have a snappy looking A-Z index as well as a SiteMap for tracking down what video cast you wish to view - these are all found in the Pages Menu heading.
Oh, and to finish off :) we have an AJAX enriched contact page :)

regards

Members Area Given a Facelift!

The SupportCasts.com Team has been very busy creating a new and better experience for our members.

We have rebuilt the entire Members Area with a new theme, new engine and a much easier way to find and view Casts. (Yes we even have a search function)

New AppleTV and iPhone Feeds will allow you to view Casts in iTunes or on your iPhone. New Casts will show in your iTunes Podcast area automatically.

Within a few days we will have a Cast in the Public Area of our web site with a tour and overview of the Member Area. This will allow non Members to have a peak into this great new look.

Everything we have done is to set ourselves up for growth while keeping the user experience easy and understandable.

In other news, we have started replacing the older movies created earlier in 2008 with brand new Casts that use our latest technology and audio equipment. With 29 Casts to update we expect this to take at least a month or even longer. In the meantime new casts will continue to be posted.

We hope you like the new look and navigation, along with the comments and ratings (please be kind on the older casts... ;-) ).

RW Backup Cast Has been ReCast

All new and updated with our new audio and video quality. Check out the RW Next Steps and the Backup cast rw017.

Other new casts added this week are on e-Commerce and integrating e-Junkie into various page styles in Rapidweaver and in Sandvox.

More casts will be updated this week as well as a secret project we have the curtains pulled tight on. More on this as soon as we have the polish on it.

The SupportCasts Team is not sitting still, that is for sure!

More news soon,

The SupportCasts Team

Page updates

Hi there,
To improve the end user experience for the members of SupportCasts.com :) we are currently re-structuring this content. We should be finished with this by the end of today, so apologies if you encounter any bad links
Regards
SupportCasts Team

New Casts, A Discount and a Freebie

We have three new casts on the Rapidweaver Plugin: Blocks available.

1. Blocks - Overview and how to work with it
2. Smart Blocks - Using and Creating
3. Master Pages - Available for anyone to view: Coming Next will be Blocks Inspector
We are proud to announce a Promotional Coupon Code from YourHead.com for 15% off all* Plugins. You can get a bundle or individual Plugins at this limited time discount. Offer ended Nov 1, 2008.

The Coupon Code is in the screencast, yes even the freebie, and by simply watching you can get this code.

We plan on many more promotions but, many will be for Members Only and members receive access to high resolution screencasts free of external advertising. Get your 13 month unlimited access pass by joining SupportCasts.com today at the low price of only $49.95. This will only be available until October 15, 2008!

In Other News:
All of the original Casts are being redone to come up to the new video and audio setting standards we have now. This might take a bit of time but will be well worth it in the end.

*PayLoom not included

SupportCasts to Go

The countdown begins for SupportCasts-to-Go
You wanted portability well you are going to get it :)

Stay tuned to our blog feed for more details.

Current Casts Updated. Wahoo!

After a long weekend almost all Casts have been updated that need to be. 

Improved image quality, improved audio volume and now in three sizes:

Desktop, iPhone and Apple TV

There are still six casts I felt should be re-cast to bring them up to the new standard. The originals are still up for viewing until then.

How will members know what is updated and what is not? I have a small "updated" image in the Cast Description showing which are updated.

Show Notes are now available for Advanced Casts (RW) and more will be added as existing shows are reviewed.

So what is next? 

Making new Casts! 

A lot more is going on behind the scenes so what for more news soon!

Sundog

Low Volume Audio and Video Quality

For those viewing the Rapidweaver Next-Steps and Advanced Casts, these are being reworked. Some may have their audio enhanced and others may simply be re-cast. 

Once done there will be three formats available: Desktop, iPhone and AppleTV. 

I hope to get some of them updated over the weekend and published early next week. 

I will add an "updated" image to signify which ones have made the grade and been updated.

Thanks for your patience as we sort out things here in the opening weeks. 

Sundog

Logging in and Joining

Whew! Ok, we have been working overnight on solving these issues. Sign-Up and Member Login is now working.

As always, if there are any other issues or you have some suggestions  please feel free to post these.

More content work is going on behind the scenes , but we will post about that when we are ready :D

Logging in again - troubles

We do apologise but looks like our host who shall remain nameless is driving is nuts with server outages/connectivity problems. We seem to have resolved this but please do use the contact form to get in touch with us 

regards

Login issues resolved - Yippeee

Another day at the SupportCast lab :)

I am pleased to say we have got those login issues resolved now, you will only be asked one time ;) 

Thanks to all for your patience on this fix.

SupportCasts - problem reporting

To aid and speed up response in case of any problems.  A problem reporting form has been loaded to the respective member pages . When reporting problems, do please include as much information as our form allows for the team to review.

We are aware of instances where logging requires you to double enter your details, we are working on this with our hosting provider.

If you have any other recommendations, then feel free to ask :) 

We are open for business

Well, it has been a while since our last post but the team have been working in the background sorting out logistics and content delivery and :::drum roll :::

We are proud to announce that we are open for business, (Yay) and to celebrate our launch we have a special 45 day offer to access Supportcasts.com which you can view over here 

Who is the new number 3 ?

Well we are pleased to announce The new number 3 :)

Well he has been there since the beginning and also a Theme developer for RapidWeaver and Sandvox. A good solid supporter for RapidWeaver, sandvox and the Mac community
Well here he is on our about page "Hello Gary"

Creative Team being unmasked ..slowly

It's all go-go-go over at SupportCasts.com HQ.
Documents flying , notes being taken and videos being cut. This just gives us the feeling that we should have got some nice Mac Pro machines , maybe later in the year I am told by the Finance whizz :)

Anyhow, we are unmasking team member 2 today, I'm sure you will appreciate his slick surfin' style. ::drumroll ::: "Hello Larry "

New look for SupportCasts.com

Well that’s it ! We were getting a bit tired of the 'classic' black look to our site and have unveiled, why bother waiting :) , our new look on the site today including the 'About' page. Full details will be released over the coming days as to who are behind SupportCasts.com. So subscribe to our feed , follow us on Twitter and you will be the first to know :D

Access to the promo screencasts on Sandvox and RapidWeaver is accessible via the Blog links below for Flash based playback or if you enjoy the H264 playback (iPhone users you too) then head over to the QuickTime screencasts in the sidebar image

Request your tutorial for future showing

Over at SupportCasts.com we are busy behind the scenes crafting some really cool screencasts :D
However, what we also want to do is allow you , that’s right you , to request what you want covered in a video screencast (Yay !!!)

You can make a request over here, we will review the responses on a regular basis and decide what will be planned into the coming programme schedule ...well not quite yet . We need to launch SupportCasts.com first of all ;)


PS: I should note we are focusing on Sandvox and RapidWeaver applications right now, but we will expand upon this very soon

Embed YouTube with RapidWeaver

Our promo screencast tutorial covering the basics of embedding with YouTube :)

Sandvox using Facebox image overlay

A promo screencast from SupportCasts.com covering usage and how to integrate Facebox overlay with SandVox web design application. You will need the accompanying Show Notes which area available here