Screenflick: The New Screencast

These days there are so many Screencasts for Mac. There are also a ton of tools to do Screencasts for Mac. Today I am going to be talking about a very popular one called Screenflick. A while back, our own Daniel Greg did a review of Screencast. Since then, they have changed the name to Screenflick, and added many new features.

The first thing you will notice about Screencast is that it has a simple, yet elegant, interface. There are only three sections: Screen, Audio and Keyboard & Mouse. This is much different from some other Screencasting apps because it is so simple. Some people might also call this a weakness because it doesn’t have all the features of some Screencasting apps, but for most people you don’t need all those features. Screenflick also has a few preferences, too.

The Screen pane is very simple; there are only a few options. You can have either a fixed recording zone or a set size that follows the mouse. If you choose the first one, when you start to record it will ask you for the area that you want to record. If you choose the latter one, you don’t need to set a size. The “Show Camera Bounds” option is great if you want to see what is being recorded so you can make sure that you are capturing everything that you want. You can also choose the capture rate. The higher the number, the bigger the size and quality. The lower the number, the smaller the size and quality. It is nice for a Screencasting app to have only a few options for the screen recording so you don’t have to configure like a million things. But this can also be a problem; some people want more options, like zooming or window highlighting. Screencast gives you the basic features that you need.

The Audio pane also has only a few options. You can choose to record system audio and record microphone audio. For recording microphone audio, it lets you choose the input you want to use. I cannot think of any other audio features that you would need, so the feature-set for audio is perfect. Not too many features, not too few — it gives you all you need.

The Keyboard & Mouse pane gives you a lot of options. You can choose to show or hide the mouse, show mouse clicks and show keyboard shortcuts. You can customize the length and color of the mouse clicks, but there are more options for showing shortcuts. Again, you can choose the duration and background, but you can also choose font size, position and what shortcuts not to show. When you are recording, after you have done the shortcut, it displays it on the screen; it would be nice if it showed them as you typed them in, but then there couldn’t be exceptions. It would also be cool to show text that is typed in, but that is not needed.

The Preference pane just has a few options for pre-recording setup and the menu-bar. You can show the size or the length of the recording. If you want a recording to be a certain size, this really helps, because it is right in the menu bar. But, if you are recording the whole screen, you probably don’t want your viewers to see this, so you can just turn it off.

After you have recorded a Screencast with Screenflick, you get the normal compression options for any Screencasting tool. You can choose an audio compressor and a video compressor and the dimensions. These are all the compression options needed to compress a Screencast.

Screenflick, by the Araelium Group, may not have all the features of some other tools, but it is a lot cheaper at only $29! Compare that to Screenflow, which is $99. I think Screenflick is more than worth the $29, even with only simple options. If you are looking for a simple-to-use Screencasting tool, Screenflick is perfect, because it has all that yo need to record a great Screencast, but it doesn’t have so many features that you can’t figure out how to do anything.