Nowadays, almost every kind of software release is accompanied by some sort of screencast showing off the new features - usually with boring, disembodied narration.

Not so with Paterva, whose edgy videos are moodily shot and edited like a Bourne film, accompanied by a dubstep soundtrack. A preview of Maltego Radium, for example, is hosted “on a rooftop in Johannesburg, under a full moon” by a member of the development team clad in fingerless gloves and hoodie (the video is embedded below).

Their product is far from standard, too. Maltego is a Java-based data mining app, designed for analysis of networked data - from social networking profiles to internet infrastructure. In the moonlit video, they demo an example of data-mining a Twitter account - in this case, Paris Hilton’s - for geographical and device info.

Granted, not every software release justifies such a dark, brooding video. In fact, it would be downright hilarious for something like Jetty was marketed in the same way.

Still, plenty of developers could learn a thing or two from Maltego (and, to a lesser extent, PrimeFaces) in the art of screencasts. Sometimes, a screencast can be so good it ‘goes viral’, like Dropbox’s meme-laden demo, which saw the company blow up on Digg long before it became a household name.

(via Geertjan Wielenga)