Screencast Review: CoffeeCup’s Web Form Builder

Screencast are great on AETuts, but on freelanceswitch I’m not a fan. In fact i did not even watch it. The content may be great and video always brings a new element, but for instance i read freelanceswitch post mostly from my rss reader. Having a video does not allow me to do that, it also limits when and where i can take the content from freelanceswitch in.

That’s my 2cents. Please don’t have very many video post, reading them is much better for me personally.

I like screen casts. but I would highly recommend adding a text introduction/overview of what you’re covering and why your readers should care. Otherwise, it’s just blind. You also might reconsider rewriting the headline to engage the reader and for better SEO.

Yep I can’t access Flash content at work so that’s another mark for not being able to access Freelance Switch everywhere.

A text introduction would be good also.

Nice tutorial. I was looking for a good web form design/generation tool and ended up writing one!
It is still in beta; but you can have a look: http://www.simfatic.com/forms/download-beta.php

Intro and bullet points are a good idea. I’ll make sure to add that, if I do another one

This is a cool idea but the poor validation features of this software make me shun it. Also, did I see correctly at the end that the entire form is Flash? That’s a deal breaker as well.

Maybe Flash forms are more protected against spambots, but I would never put a form on the web without some kind of protection, be it captcha or a honeypot….unless your client needs some cheap Viagra….

I agree with others … I always skip videos. They are rarely a good use of my time. I use an rss reader and read much faster than I can watch or listen. Maybe consider posting a script of the video? Then, if there’s something in the script that intrigues, this will make me more likely to consider taking the time to watch.

I think we’ll be going ahead with both screencast and non-screencast video in the future, but definitely not to the exclusion or overshadowing of written material (which I much prefer myself, which is no surprise coming from an editor and writer!). Based on the feedback we’ll try to always provide textual context unless for some reason it’s not relevant to do so. Thanks guys!

Back on-topic… I hate captchas with a whole lot of passion. I just failed a Google captcha several times in a row because they’re so hard to decipher. Can we start some sort of movement to have them removed from the Internet?

@Joel – A bit of both is good.

Captchas are a necessary evil, the best ones (and often least effective) are ones that you can actually read! Ah well.

Julian — on the flip side, if the human can’t read the captcha, they also fall into the category of least effective. You just can’t win! Personally I prefer to use a good spam filter like Akismet to weed out the nasties (at Envato we’ve used submission forms that are essentially hacked WordPress comment fields with success before).

I loved it!

First: I would also have liked a description on the video before watching it.
I would also have liked to know that it wasn’t a freeware/openSource – which I thought all the way till the end of the video… Hmmm… It’s kinda just a commercial now, isn’t it?

BUT….
I’m stupid when it comes to forms. (I haven’t even got one on my own website yet. Because I can’t figure out how to make one… I’m also stunned because of all the talk about security, and not having your email on your website because you’ll get spammed unless it is packed into javascript – that I also fail at doing… (Should I perhaps consider changing my career-path??)

But this software looks so nice! It would help me a great deal!

However, I think it would be very appopriate(?) to add some follow-up links after the video.
They could for instance be about:
- implementing the form into a modal box
- examples of great mailforms
- security in mailforms
- buy it here

Thanks for sharing…

I loved the video – I LOVE Vimeo too…

BUT what about us, mac users – what should we use instead of this application?? i have searched google a bit without luck

I would also like a better description of the video content and tutorial. My statistics say that most people who love the video often would forget to comment about it… they watch it and try it straight away…

Mark, shimmy on over to mac.appstorm.com for the smarter users such as yourself. Maybe they’ll feature a similar product (again i haven’t watched the video, nor care to do so, all i know about it is what’s in the comments).