Preferences
General Preferences
You can use the General Preferences pane to change your software update settings, to show or hide the Silverback icon in your menu bar, to set the Silverback window keyboard shortcut and to change the location of your Silverback project folders.
To change the keyboard shortcut for switching to the Silverback application, click into the oval box and press the combination of keys you wish to use. Remember to choose a key combination that is unlikely to be used during your usability test. Switching to another application and pressing the keyboard shortcut will bring the Silverback window to the front.
You can change the location of the temporary video and project files that Silverback stores. This can be helpful if your local disk space is limited, you may then wish to configure Silverback to save files to an external drive.
Capture Preferences
You can use the Capture Preferences panel to choose whether to record iSight video and audio using your Mac’s inbuilt iSight camera or by plugging in an external one. You can also select which size you want to capture video in.
If you have limited hard disk space you may wish capture video in ‘Small’ size. It’s important to remember that you are only able to export your session up to the size your video was captured at. Any sessions you capture at ‘small’ size will only be available to export at ‘small’ size.
Export Preferences
Silverback exports the iSight video of your session as a ‘Picture in Picture’ overlay. In this preferences panel you can choose to position the video in a part of the screen not used in the usability test. If this isn’t possible you can set the subjects video to be semi-transparent, this will allow you to see screen activity behind it.
You can choose the size you’d like to export your Silverback session in, ranging from Small to Giant. Selecting ‘small’ will take longer to export, but will give you a smaller file. Selecting ‘large’ will take less time to export, but will give you a larger file.
You can choose whether you want to show mouse clicks in your export and whether to show special key presses. You can also choose whether you wish to output your iSight audio and whether you want to include chapter marks for any tasks and highlights captured in the session.
Special key presses, such as SHIFT, are not automatically recorded by Silverback as these are not visible on the screen. If you wish to record special key presses you will need to make sure this option is selected in you Mac’s System Preferences. Go to System Preferences and select Universal Access.
In Universal Access you should tick Enable Access for Assistive Devices box.
Register
You should use this panel to register your copy of Silverback.
Save the license key to your computer, open the finder and drag the file into the box in the register panel.