Show HN: Iorad - the tutorial builder

LOVE it.

I always hated screen casts. I prefer creating a Word or PDF document with annotated screenshots which user can go through at their own pace. One of the idea in my idea list was to make it easy to take screenshots and annotate them and create a polished PDF.

But what you have created is even better. It is highly interactive and user can follow the steps as they work on the actual application. Extremely well done. I think you should market the hell out of this. I think there are lot of buyers out there for this kind of software.

What kind of pricing are we looking at?

P.S.: Always great to see a team of Indians creating a software product, I wish you all the best. I hope you also become as successful as Visual Website Optimizer guys.

This is really great. I (or my employer) would gladly pay for this. I have two suggestions & critiques:

I think that by eschewing video and audio entirely, you're missing out. As apple has demonstrated, animations and transitions are important to the user experience and user understanding. I would definitely allow screenboard creators to import or upload video and audio clips. Perhaps this could be a feature for advanced/paying users.

Audio is pretty important too. Sometimes, explaining things via voice or with sounds are more efficient than writing. You can convey emotion and emphasis through voice that don't come through via a limited text palette. The web audio api part of HTML5 is getting better and I would investigate using this. Again, for advanced/paying users.

But seriously, thanks for building this. I've wanted something like this for a long time.

I'm not a big fan of the outline you used to indicate the next action. When I saw your tutorial, I couldn't see where the Login button is because of the thick orange outline hovering the login button making it hard to the "login" button. It needs to be outside of the labels and it should be easier to see.

You should research for a different way to direct users there, the outline should be optional. Maybe an arrow or other type of animation.

Other than that, it looks great and I can't wait to see it mature. I'd love to use it!

TRUE STORY: Today I walked in dreadfully into the office because this is the day we start planning, designing and building training materials for a very large $1 million+ enterprise software implementation I've been leading for over a year. Before I start my day I go online to get my daily dose of HN stories and SHAZAM! Like a miracle out of IT Heaven this amazing tool comes out out of nowhere to punch my daunting work burden in the nuts! My work just got so much easier!! When are you guys enabling the premium features to export to PPT and PDF?? I need those PRONTO!

Keep up the good work guys!

Pricing - Comming soon (should be Coming Soon) or ideally should be listed from the beginning ;)

A lot of the examples at the bottom seem to either be blank or break your webserver seeing a lot of

Error Occurred While Processing Request Element XMLATTRIBUTES.IMAGEID is undefined in a Java object of type class coldfusion.xml.XmlNodeMap referenced as ''

The error occurred in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\iorad\app\dspHTMLPlayer.cfm: line 777

Awesome product, this is really fantastic. Creating basic tutorials/screencasts has always been such a time-consuming task, this will help immensely and is much easier for users to consume.

Here's a few usability items I uncovered while playing around with it...

- Support undo. I accidentally deleted a slide, but it was gone forever :)

- Same with on-slide elements...

- I used it to create a tutorial on modifying PDF document properties in Acrobat, but the dialog box was cutoff top and bottom and I was unable to scroll to close the dialog.

- The above issue resulted in me creating 42 slides instead of 12, because I kept clicking and scrolling to try to get to the 'OK' button on the dialog. The tutorial would have been usable, but there is no way to easily delete 30 slides at once, and clicking 'delete... confirm delete' on 30 slides is tedious.

Overall, very nice work, and best of luck!

This is a cool idea. I do screenshot-tutorials all the time and this would ease the workflow. My only concern is that I would like to have control of the produced content as an export for my own blog/site.

I understand that's not financially favorable to you as a free service, but will it be part of the paid service?

The instructional dialogue windows dominate the screen visually so it distracts the user from what's actually happening on the website. They won't know where to focus their eyes, and the amount of time it takes for them to orient themselves for each dialogue could make it more cumbersome than a "regular" screencast.

I think people who hate screencasts would also be annoyed at the slow animations between each step. Is it just me, or are they more than a second long?

What is that meta and form between your doctype and <html>? A coldfusion specialty?

And please, fix the SQL injection you may have and the debug mode too! Try searching for something like: " (a double-quote only)

Really really impressed. But a question about the choosing the technology. While everybody is on the rails/express bandwagon ... its interesting to see someone using cold fusion to build cool stuff. Lesson for my inner voice: Stop telling me, "all cool kids are doing rails/node, so I have to learn rails/node/django/...".

I read somewhere just go with the tech you're most comfortable with - would it be wrong to assume the same here?

(Probably this should be directed to Binamra. And awesome frontend by Susrut and Amar!)

Congrats to you and the entire team!

DAMN! This has been my million dollar idea I'll build one day for 2 years. Oh well, at least someone else did a good job of it.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. I even wireframed the same interaction. Frustrated but happy. At least someone did it.

How long did it take you guys to put this together? It's quite slick. I hadn't though of using a java applet to record stuff. That locks in the IP and helps with some things, but I was imagining more of a browser extension approach.

Awesome! get some pricing info up there so those of use that want to use it can get in early on a good deal.

feedback: Have a native English speaker (english major, english professors, someone that likes to debate the finer points of our pitiful English language) read through all text facing the user. I have found several type-o's that are distracting and take away from the quality of product.

an example: "the caption text will be _empt_ and you will" should be _empty_ .

awesome job!

This is awesome! I hate screencasts too so I hope this tool will be adopted widely. Just the name... How should it be pronounced? Does 'iorad' mean something? (I'm Swiss German) In any case thank's a lot!

All the Javascript on the site is broken when your browser locale is set to Japanese, it seems like cfmessage_ja.js is corrupted: http://imgb.mp/ipz.jpg

I really like this. Makes explaining things very easy. One critique, the first step allows me to click on the main screen to advance, but from there I have to move to the navigation bar below. Is this configurable? I only went through the linked example.

EDIT: I didn't catch that you could actually execute the actions laid out to move forward. This wasn't clear, but makes sense now that I've seen it.

This is amazing, thus guaranteed to sell to one of the large screencasting/training companies quickly (good for the team!). What happens to all the free public stuff then?

Example buyout -> shutdown: http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/2010/06/screentoast...

I like it. A VERY MINOR piece of feedback: the font is ugly as sin. I don't know why, but it kept distracting. It feels... off balance.

It looks really cool, but clicking on one of the newly created projects[1] gives me a 500 error and a coldfusion stacktrace, you might want to turn those off.

[1]http://www.iorad.com/?a=app.htmlplayer&accessCode=GUEST&...

Is it down? I'm getting: 500 - Internal server error.

Overall though very optimistic this could replace Adobe Captivate and some use of Camtasia for me. Please add support to generate a simple list of actions (including or based on edited captions). I'm dying for something that will let me produce: 1. Demo script 2. Handouts 3. Video

All in one run.

No Linux support for a web application?

Really cool. Feedback: The outlines on the buttons to be clicked obscure the buttons. An optional sound track would be great as well.

Design details make this work or not work - put some effort into figuring out how to guide the user's eye to keep their attention where it needs to be.

"Password has to be atleast 6chars and atmost 15chars." - why the 15 max character limit?

The only critique: Pricing - Coming soon => you should start charging for your product right now. You will get better feedback, you will get customers which work with you and help you improve product, etc.

Otherwise - excellent. You have a customer :)

This responds to a very real and ubiquitous need. And fills its niche very nicely. It doesn't just make you a passive watcher: it immerses you in the very centre of action. Splendidly executed -- I definitely will be using it. Kudos!

Having English as a second language I am always reluctant to make a screencast. My spoken English would be distracting, if not for the brokenness then at least for my lack of confidence when speaking it.

This looks like a great alternative! Thanks :)

Very nice. Does it record audio? I am thinking of suggesting this to a local ruby users' group that currently records using video cameras. If it did audio, this would be perfect for them. And I have more use cases in mind.

It's a good idea. Nice job.

I have some issues with the usability of the presentations, specifically around the prominence of the next action. The green highlighting isn't visible enough, and the annotations look like buttons themselves.

If this had audio capabilities my company would also gladly pay for it to create tutorials of our web product offerings for our user base. Looks amazing, I'll be following this project closely, keep up the good work!

I totally avoid any kind of tutorials for our products because I'm using Camtasia and it takes me all freaking day to do a 2 minute recording. This is a way better solution for me. Going to give it a try for sure!

Thank you so much for this! I have clients who can't figure out how to use certain web apps and typing it out just isn't the same as being there in person. This is the next best thing.

Awesome, I love it. I think needs an "auto-play" function though, so people can just sit back and treat it like a video. When I click the "play" triangle, I'm expecting video.

What would you think about prompting the user to sign up after they make their own tutorial (so they can save it or what have you), rather than before they start?

Is there any way to make the capture window full screen or make it dragable so that it could be moved over top of the task bar for or icon tray for instance?

Paid version, where all the sharing features drive traffic to my site and there is no Iorad branding would be worth the upgrade I think.

here's a demo we made using for salesforce on how to create a new lead http://www.iorad.com/?a=app.htmlplayer&accessCode=GUEST&...

Looks nice, one thing I spotted was the FAQ section heading is 'Frequently Asked Qeustions'

Amazing. I could really see myself using this.

Although language and UI elements could use some polishing.

It looks really great. I will tell my support guy at my startup to give it a try.

> "so I made this app instead"

Is this really the work of a single individual? How long did it take you? It looks like something a team built.

Edit:

http://www.iorad.com/?a=site.about

It was a team. I would have upvoted this in heartbeat if hadn't been for the misleading title.

Quick guide is also a very good feature! I really liked this app.

Has lots of potential. Congrats you are onto something here.

Getting ready to try this out on my app!

Very impressive.

This. Changes. Everything.