Silverback Unveiled | May 13, 2008

A few months ago Clearleft accidentally leaked the fact we were working on our own application, known as Silverback. I say accidentally because we had just bought the domain name silverbackapp.com and thought we’d better post up a holding page. However the combination of a great logo from Jon Hicks and an amazingly inventive parallax technique from Paul meant the page got far more coverage than anticipated. Before the week was out we had over 5,000 people registered for updates and had started to receive comments like “I don’t know what Silverback is, but I know that I want it!” So no pressure there then!

For the last few months we’ve been working in what some people (not me) would describe as stealth mode. That doesn’t mean we’ve been coming to work dressed as ninjas, although that could be fun. Instead we’ve been keeping schtum about the project. You see; we thought the idea was so blindingly obvious we didn’t want anybody else doing the same thing. Greedy I know!

We’ve been beavering away at the app for the last few months, hunting for glitches and tweaking the interface. We’ve put the app in front of some friends for alpha testing and have just opened it up to a semi-private beta. We’re currently working on setting up the support site and hooking in the payment system. Once that’s all done it should be chocks away!

So by now I’m sure you’re all wondering what the hell this Silverback thing is? Well it’s time to put you out of your misery. Very simply, Silverback is an OSX application to help people run their own low-cost Guerrilla usability tests. It captures screen activity, records audio and video from your built in iSight, and then composites it into a handy Quicktime movie for later use. There are a few added features that make it perfect for usability testing, but it’s basically as simple as that!