Reviews

16 months ago I wrote an article concerning my experience using Camtasia for the first time. If you read anything from that article, read the summary...in which I both praise Camtasia and apologise for writing so much about its inconsistent interface.

You may be surprised to learn that I now own my own licence of Camtasia (and Snagit) as a replacement to previous screen recording tools on my Mac. Having used Camtasia again in a recent role, I was curious to see if things had improved. Unfortunately, it's a revisit that has mixed results.

In April of this year I began a contract with OSPRI as a Learning Designer, with a lot of the work focused on the development of micro videos for staff training. The selection of software to use was ultimately my decision, but it was suggested that Camtasia would be the most effective tool.

Never having used Camtasia before, I investigated, agreed and then set about producing the micro videos. The following is a discussion about my experience with Camtasia for the first time over the past few months.

Mac OS X Mavericks wasn't a great experience for me. Understandably perhaps, my April 2008 iMac seemed to struggle with the OS. The update to Mac OS X Yosemite doesn't really improve upon the experience, but now the spinning beachball or interface delays seem to be the norm for me.

iOS 7 is a radical overhaul of the performance, look and feel, and way that you interact with your iOS device. It moves away significantly from previous versions of the iOS, bringing with it differing ways to interact with your iOS device. The UI/UX changes are severe in many cases. Apple has moved away from the approach of small incremental changes to iOS with each update, with a significant change that is not to everyone's liking.

After a 2 year hiatus from writing a review of Mac software (due to being under a "non-compete" with the sale of my Mac and iPhone websites) I was keen to get stuck in to try CleanMyMac 2.0 from MacPaw. I'm generally not a fan of commercial applications designed to check the state of my Mac and I am certainly not a fan of some companies that saturate the web with advertising trying to get us to buy these types of applications. But MacPaw isn't the guilty party in this instance and the software looked impressive when I first spotted the announcement.

Please note this is not a review and is not intended as a guide in any way shape or form...it's just some random notes on things I discovered whilst getting ready to install Mountain Lion and on starting to use it.

After almost a week of using Lion I confess I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I'm wishing I had stuck with Snow Leopard in many ways and am in fact turning many options back to act more like they did on Snow Leopard. These are just some random (actually very random) notes from things I discovered.