I've been following Silverback for a while. The parallax effect on their site has kept me entertained for hours (just resize the window, it's crazy).
But the app will be an invaluable tool to user experience designers. It works well, it's simple, and solves a serious problem that the developers had themselves at Clearleft. Those are the ingredients for a successful product.
Great example of taking advantage of the commoditization of technology. I once worked at a start-up that spent tens of thousands of dollars building a lab to do this. Being creative with what has become standard tech to create a solution that costs orders of magnitude less than what was previously available is the way to build a company. Nice job!
Horrible website. I'm seriously totally underwhelmed by their website, which seems half-assed and incomplete.
The app looks alright, but Screenflow (which they interestingly used to record their screencast of their app) does the same thing. We've recorded dozens of usability tests using it, and it's been great.
Silverback does, however, record mouseclicks and the various keystrokes though which is a nice thing to have. I like the interaction with the remote as well by the moderator.
I disagree, personally I like the look of the website. It presents itself in a no nonsense manner. It states it's intention in a straight forward way. (that's a big plus for me as I hate websites that beat around the bush, just tell me what's the product it and what's it about!)
Apart from the cute gorilla, the side bar beside him states the features of the app. Features which I might find favorable or not. But still at the most it is stated clearly.
Yes, the site does its job and works fine, but this came out of clearleft. These guys used to be allstars a few years ago, so although the site is decent, it doesn't live up to what I or other designers might expect to see from Clearleft. It's nothing at all spectacular at all, and it even comes from themselves. Not like this is some client project, it's as though they didn't care at all.
Haven't had a chance to download it yet, but it seems really close feature-wise to Screenflow from varasoftware.com, which we've used very successfully for usability testing recently. We were considering Morae initially, but Screenflow works with our Macs and ended up working out great. Plus, we really didn't need the extra analysis tools Morae offered anyway. I'll be interested to try this out now and see the differences now.
But the app will be an invaluable tool to user experience designers. It works well, it's simple, and solves a serious problem that the developers had themselves at Clearleft. Those are the ingredients for a successful product.