We've Launched! Hooray!

After 3 months of private beta, many months in development, and many years in the making, BugCam has finally launched!!! Woohoo!

It's been an exciting and exhilarating day for us! We've been on the home page of Hacker News since noon (pacific time) and we've received a ton of traffic, lots of praise, great feedback, many new users, and more!

Thank you everyone for helping inform the product.  We'll be making it better and better in the coming weeks, months, and years.

P.S. There's a truckload of new features and improvements, but we haven't had a chance to write about them yet. Stay tuned!

Improved Install process and much more

We're getting really close to launch! Thanks everyone for all of your input!

We've made a number of major improvements, bug fixes, enhancements to our "marketing pages", and more, including:

• An improved installation process, which no longer requests (or requires) administrative access. This should solve the installation pain that a number of you experienced.
  
  Thank you so much to our friends Victor L. and Martin G. at Blueberry Software for your help on this!
  
  Also, our install process and executable is now digitally signed, which should make the process warmer and fuzzier!
  
  
• Updated video page, featuring, umm, well, more video.  The video now renders as the full width of the page, more prominently, easier to see without going full screen, because, you know, you might be interested in viewing the video.
  
  
• Major speed improvements when fetching the videos and the thumbnails.
  
  
• Improved display of video date/time: now showing the date/time the video was created: A) in your local time, and B) in a friendly, human-readable format: "3 days ago" "15 minutes ago", etc.
  
  
• Now using shorter URL's: http://getbugcam.com/bugvideo/xxxx vs. http://www.getbugcam.com/bugvideo/xxxx
  
  
• Improved security: entire site now using SSL.
  
  
• Crucially important: randomly display different bugs on our logo!
  
  
• Improved "FAQ" and "How it Works" pages.
  
  
• A snazzy video for the home page, explaining "What is Bugcam" and "How it Works":
  
  
  
  

• Last, but not least, vastly improved Gemini integration.  More news about this to come!

Thanks again everyone!

Fun With Bugs!

Will the bugs take over!?

More great stuff, courtesy of our super-awesome illustrator, Goopymart!

Q: What Does it Take to Get a Code Signing Certificate?

A: In our case, at least 5 phone calls (including one in the middle of the night), many e-mails back and forth, and, finally, one last call to Comodo customer service.

Apparently, it's a problem that we requested the Cert via the rather obscure browser called "Google Chrome."  Heard of it?  It's just not supported.  We had to re-request the certificate using IE, and then (very carefully...) retrieve our certificate using the very same browser on the very same machine.  Seriously!  Sigh...  Glad that's over!

Working on Code Signing Certificate

If you install BugCam now, you should see something like this (Windows 7):

And another one that looks kind of like this:

And this if you're running Norton:

Yikes! In order to avoid these ominous looking screens, we have to digitally "sign" our code using a Code Signing Certificate (P.S. - these usually cost about $200 per year, but Tucows [yes, they still exist!] resells Comodo certs for $75 per year).

Should have this installed and fixed in the next few days...

Why BugCam Automatically Updates Silently (Without Asking the User)

This is my son's Windows desktop:

He's four years old. That's him driving a John Deere 9R Series Tractor (560hp engine)! 

Anyway, see that window in the center of the screen? Here it is, enlarged:

My son, four years old (did I mention that!?), who doesn't yet know how to read, has trained himself to click "Remind Me Later" every time his computer starts up. He literally says out loud "Remind Me Later!" and clicks the button.

Nobody wants to be bothered with notifications about updates.

Just released: More Metadata (Product Name and Version)

Moments ago, we released a really useful new feature!

BugCam now automatically makes a note of the name and version of the Windows app that you are recording:

This is just one bit of metadata - we're planning on adding lots more.

Soon we'll update the integrations with the bug tracking tools (Gemini, FogBugz, Mantis, JIRA, etc.) and make sure that this info is automatically passed-into the correct fields in the bug tracking tool (so you won't have to type it in!).