Blog Twitter Mailing list

Creating a Rogerthat screencast

Screencasts are an excellent tool to convince your colleagues or customers of automating their communication and business processes using Rogerthat. Typically you will

  • Create a few sample communication flows for your customers
  • Design them in the Message Flow Designer
  • Create and apply message branding using your customers logos and themes
  • Run the message flow in an Android or iPhone simulator, and capture this in a screencast
  • Show off your results

Creating a screencast for Android

It is possible to create a screencast for Android completely for free on your Windows, Mac or Linux computer. This is very valuable to give demos to customers.

Here are the installation instructions for Windows:

  • First you need to install the Java JDK from Oracle. If you do not have it, download and install it from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html – Make sure you pick the JDK and not the JRE!
  • Now you need to install the Android emulator from Google:
    • Download and install the SDK from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
    • For Windows, the easiest is to use the installer executable (e.g. installer_r16-windows.exe)
    • At the end of your installation, the “Android SDK Manager” will open. If not, you can always start it from the Windows Start Menu; Android SDK Tools; SDK Manager
    • Install everything from the latest SDK: at this point this corresponds to Android 4.0.3 (API15). Also install the “Google USB Driver package”.
    • Click “Install 7 packages”; click “Accept all” licenses
    • Now the installation starts. It can take a few minutes
    • When finished, close the Android SDK manager
  • Now create an Android emulator image:
    • Go to Start Menu; Android SDK Tools; AVD Manager
    • Select “New”
    • Give name “Rogerthat”
    • Select target “Google APIs (Google Inc.) – API Level 15″
    • Choose SD card size 256MB
    • Click “Create AVD”
  • Now start the Android emulator
    • In the AVD Manager, select your AVD image, and click “Start”
    • On slow systems, this can take up to 10 minutes
    • Wait until the emulator is fully booted and you see the Android home screen.
  • Download rogerthat.apk from our site and install it on the emulator: Start Menu; Accessories; Command Prompt. Type the following commands. Correct the path to rogerthat.apk: 
    cd "C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools"
adb install C:\path\to\rogerthat.apk
  • Finally start Rogerthat on your emulator

Recording your screencast is possible using any screencasting software. For example Screencast-o-matic is free.

Creating a screencast for iPhone

Creating a screencast for iPhone, requires support from a third party web service:

  • Log on to www.pieceable.com
  • Purchase an account. The “Basic” plan is good enough
  • Send us an email such that we can upload Rogerthat to your account
  • You will receive a link, and you can run the iPhone app right in your browser.

It is helpful to display a real hand while recording screencasts. On Mac this application can be used: PhoneFinger. This is a free tool.

Recording your screencast is possible using any screencasting software. For example Screencast-o-matic is free!