Screencast: Yet Another Screencasting App?

Screencasting is a growing phenomenon, with popular podcasts such as ScreenCastsOnline, and tutorial services like TeachMac being at its forefront. Due to their simplicity to put together and ease of how they convey information, many developers are now creating screencasts to show off their new applications.

Like so many other areas, screencasting is dominated by one or two apps (namely, iShowU and SnapZPro). I was therefore thrilled to see an announcement by the Araelium Group saying that they had developed an application to compete in this growing market.

My first impressions were not great. The interface is far from spectacular, especially compared to iShowU, and there are some bizarre design choices. For example, the main window is a floating one. So whenever I want to set up a screencast I cannot do anything else without the window being in the way.

So say I get an email. I have to close the window to read it, and then open it back up again when I’m done. This may not sound like much, but it gets really irritating after a while. Other things like whenever I press the shortcut combination (I don’t know whether this will happen for everybody) to bring up the window, I get the system’s default beep. Again, very irritating. Also the animations within the interface seemed a little slow, but your mileage may vary.

All gripes aside, the options that lie within the interface make the program very flexible. You can choose whether or not Screencast has a dock icon, a menu bar icon or neither; You can have the camera follow the mouse or be at a fixed location; select the camera’s size; choose to record audio or not, and from what source.

All very handy, but if you are an iShowU user (I cannot vouch for SnapZ pro as I have never used it) this is all pretty standard. A great unique feature is Screencast’s ability to display shortcut keys and mouse clicks, saving time in post production. Again, nice but not a huge incentive to switch to using this if you are happy with something else, especially as Screencast is $9 more than iShowU.

So after all of this would I recommend you switch? Yes I would. Why? Performance and quality.

The movies that I created using Screencast outshone iShowU by a long, long margin, and for one primary reason: smooth resizing. All this time I have been using iShowU and, although I had set it to a high frame-rate, I never got that smooth, clear picture that I was looking for. If you watch ScreenCastsOnline, or a screencast that you have created using iShowU, and look closely you will notice that the mouse is never quite as it appears on your screen, or that resize doesn’t look as slick, but instead more jerky.

Screencast eliminates these issues completely. Every movie I have taken with it looked exactly as it had on my screen before hand. So for this reason I am going to have to recommend you take a look at Screencast, if you can live with its clunky aspects, the end product will blow you away.

Screencast is $29 shareware and available on the Araelium website.