This topic just keeps coming up for me and I suppose it’s something that must be an issue for others too, screencasting. This technology has been around for over a decade but recently it has really matured to point that it is very useful. What is screencasting? According to Wikipedia:

” A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. Although the term screencast dates from 2004, products such as Lotus ScreenCam were used as early as 1994.Early products produced large files and had limited editing features. More recent products support more compact file formats such as Adobe Flash and have more sophisticated editing features allowing changes in sequence, mouse movement, and audio.”

It’s highly useful when you are trying to send directions or demonstrate something without taking a million screen shots and typing directions too! Here are some tools I have found, the only ones I have not used is Adobe’s Captivate  and Screenflick but I would like to try them real soon. I am also including a couple of screen shot programs too.

ScreenToaster (Everyone and FREE!)

SnapZPro (Mac Only)

Jing (Mac and PC) (FREE)

Screencast-O-Matic (PC AN MAC) (FREE)

Adobe Captivate 4.0 (PC ONLY)

Screenflick

Screen Capture

Mac have had Command-Shift 3 and Command-Shift 4 for as long as I can remember. Command-Shift 3 gives you a screen shot of the entire screen saved to your desktop as Picture # and Command-Shift 4 bring up a cross hair that allows you to draw a box around what you want to capture and saves that file on your desktop as Picture #.

PCs must have some love too….Vista has a great too built in called Snipping Tool but XP well, it doesn’t have much so there is … PrtScr (FREE) this works for Vista too but adds some features to just your normal Print Screen command

Tags: demo, screencast