Demofuse Screencast
June 13th, 2007 by Greg R Notess
So after posting about Demofuse yesterday, I thought I’d post a screencast of what it is like to use. My Quick View of Demofuse (3.3 MB, 3:50) does not show all the features and is only based on my rather limited experience with Demofuse. Oh, and if anyone is interested in trying Demofuse, you need an invitation code. They gave me one to share — invitation code 731125. Enjoy!
*seems* like a lot of work, what with needing to insert the code on every page (only trivial if you control your own footers, etc) – do you think you’ll actually use it much? Have you used Trailfire, and would you consider these fairly similar, or is Trailfire better for multiple sites, with Demofuse more useful for single sites? One of the biggest drawbacks to Demofuse would seem to be the inability to provide a tour of a website that you don’t own. So good for your own library’s website (maybe) but not for any of the research databases to which you subscribe :-/ Thanks for the screencast though!
At this point, I’m thinking the Demofuse will work best for just a single page. Perhaps a good approach for a newly redesigned Web page so that you can help users find where the old links went? A problem that I have with both Demofuse and Trailfire is speed. Looking at Darlene’s example and some at Trailfire, they seem slow to load the page underneath the Trailfire bar at the top. With Demofuse, I noticed (although just once so far), that a page loaded a bit more slowly because it was pulling the Demofuse Javascript code. By putting the Javascript at the bottom of the page, that should let most of the rest of the content load first. Anyway, thanks for the reminder about Trailfire. I’d like to try using it and offer a better comparison. I will say that I miss the audio on both. Maybe there’s a way to combine a screencast with one or the other.