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June 1, 2007

Demofuse: Embedded Website Tours

Duncan Riley

13 comments »

demofuse.pngDemofuse allows users to create website tours that are embedded in a site as opposed to traditional flash based site tours.

Demofuse is a one man labour of love. Toronto based Greg Thomson created and coded the site in 8 months without outside assistance, an impressive feat in a competitive industry.

The service works by using Ajax overlays that allow users to create slides from websites. Users simply click on the page they want included in the slide show and Demofuse creates a slide with that page.

Slides can include highlights, arrows and cursor clicks. There is also the ability to add script to a slide.

We covered web based screencast maker Screencast-O-Matic May 29 and Demofuse fits into a similar category. Like Screencast-O-Matic this isn’t a tool for professionals, yet for casual users looking at creating website focused interactive tours and presentations Demofuse would be ideal.

For a sample TechCrunch tour click the button.


demofuse1.png

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Arpit Jacob

    June 1st, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    mmm Its slow because your blog loads a bit slow. I think flash based demo tours work better. Plus when you said click on the button I was bit confused since the hovering over the Button didn’t change the Cursor to a hand Icon.

  2. Rehan

    June 1st, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    The sample tour at DemoFuse’s own site is a much better showcase of the features.

  3. Neville

    June 1st, 2007 at 11:05 pm

    Very slow. Watch any John Udell screencast to see a way superior experience.

  4. Luther

    June 2nd, 2007 at 4:21 am

    Any chance to get an invite code to try it out?

  5. Greg Thomson

    June 2nd, 2007 at 5:29 am

    Thanks for the writup! A public invitation code that will work for all Techcrunch readers is 532127.

    As for being slow — Techcrunch is an anomly that loads tons of scripts and addons. Take a look at the sample tour at http://www.demofuse.com to get a better idea of what speeds and features are possible with Demofuse.

  6. Christopher Hogg

    June 2nd, 2007 at 5:46 am

    Luther and anyone else who would like to try it out: Greg has given me an invitation code to invite anyone who wants to try it out.

    You can use the code: 731125

  7. Chris

    June 2nd, 2007 at 5:51 am

    Love this - I’ve been looking to buy $300 worth of TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio, and this looks to be an as-good or better option. I still like the idea of screencasts because of the narration.

    Regarding loading speed - this blog’s design is bad for doing a post-page load JavaScript events. All the images have to download before the scipt will fire.

    With so many images below the fold, this makes the demo sub-optimal here…net-net, I hope it’s a fluke, and one would get better perf elsewhere.

  8. Ryan

    June 2nd, 2007 at 11:43 am

    DemoFuse seems to have a lot of new features in this realm but there is an open source option that is very similar for free that was covered earlier on Techcrunch but not referenced in this article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....ours-easy/

    Try the demo here: http://amberjack.org/?tourId=AJTour

  9. Eric Anderson

    June 4th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    Duncan Riley wrote:
    > Like Screencast-O-Matic this isn’t a tool for professionals

    So just because it wasn’t created by an army of programmers with 50 million venture capital it is not “professional”? I didn’t spend much time with it but from what I saw it was sharp and covered many corner cases (resizing, etc).

    Because of it’s fundamental design decision of working on live pages instead of screenshots (which can be outdated easily) it is slow on sites like Techcruch that load WAY too many resources from WAY to many domains (just the DNS lookups probably make my browser dizzy). But I am betting they are targeting more professional sites than Techcrunch. Sites that actually care about giving their users a good experience instead of loading several hundred KB of shitty widgets.

  10. jzhoktlrqy

    June 18th, 2007 at 6:36 pm

    Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! sbdbclcagvgwja

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