Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m like a kid in a candy store with a new toy that I get to tell you about today.
The new to is called Appear.in and it’s a social conferencing tool for private groups.
I’ve been talking a lot about Blab, a social conferencing tool for broadcast for public
groups but Blab has one serious limitation – you can’t create a private group so
you can’t use it for training or for something which you basically don’t want a bunch of
outsiders to be involved in, for private conversations.
Well, Appear.in is very similar to Blab in almost all aspects except it’s not public;
it’s private.
You can actually even close off your room and make it completely private.
You can have intimate conversations with co-workers or people you’re consulting with.
You can do small trainings and tutorials up to eight people at a time.
Currently, it’s free.
I think you‘re going to want to see it today, on DottoTech.
I am really impressed by some of the steps that we’re taking in video space in the
online world.
Certainly, Blab has been revelation for me and I have to give props to my good buddy,
Todd Maffin, who first introduced me to Appear.in.
At first blush, this tool looks very similar to a Skype-like tool.
We can do simple video conferencing but it’s far more accessible than Skype.
We don’t need a dedicated app in order to use it.
We can work right within our browser.
It’s free to use and it’s easy to configure up to eight people in a room at a time.
Now I think eight is a lot but certainly for two- and three-person conversations and that
sort of thing you’ll typically have with a small group of your team members, it is
outstanding.
And it has some wonderful integrations in other tools which I’m working with, namely
Slack, which I’m going to show you in a minute.
But I think we’d better just dive in and show you how it works.
It’s free to use and you don’t even have to sign up or anything.
You could just go and you can start a room.
You go to Appear.in and you create a room.
Now this will open my room because I have actually registered it and claim this room
to be able to use it over and over again but the room is basically where we start a conference.
Now you’re going to lose my feed from my normal screencast feed because Appear.in is
going to take over the feed.
So we’re going to have to do this part of the demo here from within the interface itself
but you can now use this tool, which as I say it’s free.
You can customize the background if you want to do some branding.
You can lock the room so that people can’t find it from the outside and you can invite
people in.
Now I’ve got several people who I’ve dealt with on a regular base on this so I can just
send them a quick little notification here and ask Mike to join us in the room.
You can also send it as a messenger, Facebook messenger or a text message if you’ve got
them in your address book in that way there.
So actually, I’ll send Mike a messenger one.
I haven’t done that before, Facebook messenger.
There it is.
Enter the friends or groups.
There’s Mike as well.
You see him right there.
I haven’t done that before.
I invited him in several locations now.
Now it takes a second because it’s going through email for Mike to come in.
There it is.
It just took a few seconds and you see Mike is now connected.
Hey Mike, how did you get that message because I also sent it to you on Facebook?
“It was Facebooks actually.
I happened to be on Facebook.”
It was faster.
If you noticed at the top of this, there’s actually the option to invite people in by
Facebook and by SMS as well.
“Yeah.”
So this is Mike Vardy.
For those of you who might not know, Mike works with me on a variety of different productivity
projects and isn’t this Appear.in just the cat’s meow?
“It is.
I used it the other day with three of the Productivitist team members, one of which
was on mobile.
So it’s really cool to see the way they arrange the windows and I can screen share
with them.
It was really, really cool.
Thanks for introducing it to me.”
Do you have anything up that you can do a quick screen share so we can see what the
screen share looks like from our side?
“Yeah, hold on a second.
Let me just do this.”
While you’re doing that, the screen sharing tool comes down here.
You hover your mouse over the top of the active window and that allows screen share.
So I’m going to let Mike share the screen with us so we can see the size.
The screen is not quite full screen but it’s actually not too bad.
Oh, it’s interesting.
There we go.
“That’s just by Word.
That’s just one part of my screen.
That’s specific.
Like with Chrome, you can share a part of it or I can share the whole like if I share
everything.”
So you shared the app there as opposed to sharing—yeah, I see now I’m getting your
widescreen format and we’re getting into the tunneling but we can see we’re getting
Mike’s computer screen here being shared.
So not quite full screen, not as perfect as Skype for doing screen sharing but still,
pretty darn functional.
“Absolutely, it’s really cool.
I like the fact that you can chat in the middle and all that stuff and you can kick people
out, which you can do at any time or ban them if you want.
“ That’s right.
What I’m going to get you do to Mike because I’m going to get you to exit again and I’m
going to show the audience a slightly different way that we can get into these calls because
we’re going to look at the Slack integration which is just brilliant.
“Okay.”
So head on out.
So here what I’m going to do is I’m just going to close this room down and when I do
that, everything should pop back over to having me now because the session is shut down so
I’m now back in my normal screencasting software.
I know we’re jumping back and forth here.
But I’m going to open up my Slack installation here and I’ve got a variety of different
groups I work with here on Slack.
Now if you haven’t checked out our Slack demo, I am so impressed with Slack as a communications
manager.
It’s a unified communications tool that we use for all our different projects now.
Our whole team uses it.
Slack allows something called integrations where you can bring outside apps and make
them work within Slack.
So Appear is a Slack integration.
So you can go through what I just did as far as launching the browser and inviting people
into the room through the browser interface or if you’re in Slack, you can go / which
brings up all of the different commands and you can see the top command I have is Appear.
If I type in Appear and then a space and then name the room that I want to invite people
to, I’ve just created the video conference right here within Slack called DottoTech.
I click on that and Mike gets that notification as an instant message happening within the
Slack environment and anybody else that was in that channel will do it as well.
Now Mike’s come back in because he has seen that notification appear in Slack.
This to me blew my mind.
I thought this was a good tool before I saw this integration with Slack.
And as soon as I saw this integration with Slack, Mike, I went boom!
This is awesome.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
So you can actually if you’re in a middle of a Slack conversation like let’s just
chat about it, you can actually do it.
“ Exactly.
Now while we’re here, because I didn’t show the screen sharing options from our side,
this is the screen sharing options that we just went through with Mike.
So we can show the entire screen, which he showed us at the end or you can show just
an application, which seems to be a slightly higher resolution.
It might be more efficient for some trainings, Mike, as you kind of go ahead.
You’re doing it again and I actually can read that quite comfortably.
“That’s cool.
That’s my text editor and if I did the whole screen then you’ll get the tunneling.”
Yeah, we did that and that’s all fine.
But I was just showing them from my side here or from our side, what it looks like when
you do it.
Now before you leave, I’m actually going to re-enter the room one more time.
What I’m doing now is I’m bringing up the smartphone and I’m bringing up the Appear
app in this smartphone.
I’m typing in the name of the room.
I’m going to plug my headset in just in case we get audio feedback from it.
Here we go.
I’m going to start.
Are you ready for this, folks?
There it is.
There we are joining.
“A little bit echo.”
Let me think.
It doesn’t matter, does it?
A little bit of echo is okay.
But isn’t that amazing?
“A little bit of echo is okay.
But isn’t that amazing?”
There.
Now I muted it so that’s good.
That to me is just phenomenal, that we have the ability to be able to bring in by mobile
as well as by desktop.
The app is running a little bit jerky right now.
Maybe it’s crushing my bandwidth because of everything that’s going on and I know
we’ve got some other things going on in the other room.
But it really gives you a good feel for how it all pulls together, doesn’t it?
“Absolutely.
You can have up to eight people in here.”
Sorry?
“Eight people.”
Yes, you can have up to eight people.
Now how do I leave the room here?
Let’s do it this way.
I’m not sure how to leave the room.
I haven’t used the mobile app enough.
There it so it’s gone.
So thanks so much, Mike.
I’m going to wrap things up here, but thanks for helping out.
“No problem.
I’m glad to help.”
That’s okay.
Talk to you later.
So folks, that is Appear.in, a whole new breed of social conferencing tool.
Up to eight people, free to use currently, I think it’s well worth checking out.
I hope you found today’s video to be well-worth spending time with.
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Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Special thanks to Mike Vardy.
Have funs storming the castle!