Faceoff

Faceoff: Screencasting

Screencasting – the not-so-ancient art of recording the computer screen for the entertainment and enrichment of others — has evolved into quite a Hydra of options. How do the myriad gladiators in this arena stack up? I’ve tried everything I could find that could record a little movement on the screen, and selected 8 contenders for the matchup. We’ll start this boxing match off with the free apps, and then see if the “money” apps stack enough features on to make them worth the cash.

Check out the chart for a quick overview of the contenders:

Copernicus

 

I was tempted to leave Copernicus out of the running, but it’s good ground on which to build. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get what I consider to be a decent video capture out of this thing. It has minimal settings to play with and way too much overhead to handle long recordings. Unfortunately, I also find it practically useless even for short recordings. At least the screenshots it can take don’t jitter.

Copernicus

Jing

Jing is a ‘casting app that serves a rather limited purpose, but it does it well and it does it for free. It also does it with an unconventional interface, which some may enjoy. In my old age I’ve come to appreciate a certain amount of conformity in application interfaces, so I personally find the “Sun” theme to be obtrusive and annoying. Lucky for me, you can swap out part of the gaudy interface for a menubar-only version. It doesn’t get rid of the giant fireball of a main window, but it gets the fluorescent sunburst off of your desktop. What Jing does have going for it is smooth recording and fast encodes, and great sharing options. Jing records to Flash SWF files and can upload to various services, providing code for embedding uploaded video. The player is branded at the end, so there’s no lying about whether you used Jing, and it’s limited to relatively short movies. It is, however, absolutely perfect for tech support and showing Aunt Marcy how to mount that DMG. And it does a pretty slick job of keeping track of your movies and screenshots with a built in library.

Jing

Screenium

I haven’t quite figured out what’s taken this app so long to get out of beta (or “preview,” as Synium calls it). Screenium does a good job of capturing full screen video for relatively long periods without using up a ton of system overhead. The options are full-fledged and include picture-in-picture iSight recording and mouse click visualization. There’s a “HotText” function that lets you assign popup text to a hotkey, but it’s a little limited and it doesn’t show the text you’ve triggered until the recording is played back. Overall, excellent quality and low overhead with great full screen recording and full options for selection, single window and mouse area recording. Seems like a worthy contender at $20.

Screenium

iShowU

iShowU is updated regularly, but its feature set has been pretty stagnant in the broad scheme of things. It works, and it works well. On-the-fly encoding causes a little more overhead and fans kick up pretty quickly, but recording quality is excellent and the presets are very inclusive. iShowU allows for a flexible recording area, multiple audio inputs and mouse click visualization. Because it encodes as you’re recording, you have to determine your final output format before you start, and if you should happen to change your mind … forget it. There’s no up-res for an H.264 320×240 video.

iShowU

Screenflick

Screenflick has a beautiful interface, at least by my aforementioned conformist standards. It gets non-conformist in creative and endearing ways, such as the film-style countdown before a delayed recording. It offers the option to display the recording length and consequent file size in the menubar. I especially like that Screenflick records uncompressed and at full resolution, allowing for multiple output formats from one source file and reducing overhead during the actual recording. Of course, you pay at the other end with long encode times, but that’s when you go off and celebrate your Oscar-winning performance (what, you didn’t know about the new category?). Screenflick also provides a library of your recordings in their original format, so you can go back and output with different dimensions and compression settings later. And, to top it all off, Screenflick has great keyboard and mouse callouts, making it a very smooth operator at the $29 price level.

Screenflick

Screen Mimic

Screen Mimic follows Screenflick’s modus operandi and steps it up a little, recording everything up front and sorting it out later, including mouse clicks, keystrokes, et cetera. Screen Mimic can output to SWF, FLV, QuickTime and its own proprietary archive format. It comes the closest to allowing editing out of the apps we’ve looked at so far, but really only allows configurable transitions between segments (where you hit “Pause”). There’s no linear editing within the application. I don’t own this one, so I worked with the demo. The demo was limited to 30 seconds of record time, which was long enough for me to experience painfully slow encodes with choppy results overall.

Screen Mimic

Snapz Pro X

I’ve had Snapz in my arsenal for a long time, and I don’t like it any more today than the first day I used it. It was a little counterintuitive then, but it’s just plain outclassed now. I know there are a lot of people using it, but in a feature-to-price comparison, it’s really not worth it anymore. Snapz Pro X is becoming a dinosaur in a rapidly evolving world, even compared to a free app like Jing … and especially next to applications like Screenflick at half its price. It does have a nice smooth-pan feature, and auto mic gain. Moving on.

Snapz Pro X

ScreenFlow

I may have mentioned ScreenFlow once or twice before. At $99.99 it’s not exactly a casual hobbyist’s application, but it’s not out of reach for those who can make good use of its capabilities.

One of the major differences between ScreenFlow and its competitors is simply the fact that it has a built-in editor that can do things with your ScreenFlow recording that no other editor could do. Things like calling out whichever window was in the foreground at a specific point in time by magnifying or highlighting it, or giving you various effects around the mouse cursor that can be transitioned in and out at any point in the playback. All of the mouse movements, keystrokes and window focus changes are recorded in the background along with input from your iSight or external video source and — for the most part — you never know that ScreenFlow is running while recording. It generally keeps the fans quietly content, even on longer recordings. It only records full-screen, but should you only want a portion of your screen, just expand the recorded track in the editor and output it at a smaller size.

Like a couple of the other programs, ScreenFlow handles iSight and external video sources, but it records them as a separate track that can be repositioned, tilted, shadowed and mirrored during editing, allowing you to fade your picture in and out in post and move it from side to side to avoid blocking live areas of the screen.

Export times can vary depending on the output and compression settings — of which you have a full range to choose from — but speed and stability have greatly increased in the latest version. ScreenFlow is a hard app to compare to the others because it’s really a studio, not just a screen capture application. Which is why I personally feel it’s fairly priced.

ScreenFlow

Envelope please …

We’re actually going to have to break this down into categories. 3 of them, to be precise, based on usage scenarios. We’ll start with the first group: they rarely need to record and when they do it’s for short lengths of time (under 5 minutes). Their masterpieces are usually sent to a co-worker or family member. As much as they love their co-workers and family members, it’s not worth a huge investment. Plus, there are a few tricks that can bring a free application up to feature parity with some of the paid varieties.

Taking the low(-cost) road

First of all, and I think it’s obvious at this point, Jing is my pick for free screen recording. It lacks the output options, but it provides a format that is widely accepted and cross-platform.

Taking note that some of the lower-cost applications lack features like mouse click callouts and full compression options, there are a few additional applications worth mentioning. For some mouse magic in your presentations, options range from the $16.95 Mouseposé (which features hotkeys, many visual configurations, spotlight effects and keystroke visualization but kind of defeats the purpose of using a free program) to the $10 PinPoint (lots of visual effects; mostly corny but some practical) and on down to the completely free Highlighter (which just places a red circle around your cursor). If you combine Highlight with the free (but somewhat buggy, in my experience) Keycastr, you can have all the glory of keyboard and mouse visualizations in any screen recording software … or maybe you just want to track your cursor on your quad-display gaming setup. Why not, it’s free.

Another useful feature found in several of these apps is the picture-in-picture recording of the iSight. A couple of programs exist for adding this functionality, my favorite being PiP. It’s simple, free and intuitive, allowing for easy positioning and sizing of the picture and fading it in and out with a hotkey.

Compressing and converting a file that’s already squashed into an FLV or SWF isn’t going to improve your results any, and there’s no cheap way that I know of to convert an SWF to QuickTime. FLV’s are easy, but the SWF format that Jing produces is pretty much what you’re stuck with. But it will play in your Aunt’s web browser, and you can share online quickly and easily.

The semi-casual user

If you’re recording regularly and need a more professional overall look, sound and production, you’re going to want to step it up. Screenium is good, but Screenflick is just $9 more and adds enough features to be worthwhile. So a $29 investment will make your presentation professional and appealing, and it’s got enough tricks in the bag that you won’t need any extras.

You will want to edit, though, and Screenflick won’t help you out much. But if you record in multiple takes and import the files into iMovie, you can edit, add titles, record a new voiceover, even write yourself a Garageband tune and import it. You’ve got everything else you need, assuming you didn’t delete the iApps to save space … you’re probably regretting that right now, huh?

The ‘casting connoisseur

If you want it all — and are getting paid enough for your screencasting endeavors that $99 is a worthwhile investment — ScreenFlow is the crown champion for full production. Its built-in editor is simple and intuitive and allows for multiple takes, voice overs, soundtracks, etc. But its real benefit is the post-production callouts and highlights that it can provide, saving you from having to think about hotkeys at all while recording. Yes, Camtasia Mac is coming to fight for the crown, but for now the reigning king is ScreenFlow.

May your screencasts always be thrilling (and short, please), whichever tools you choose!

Popularity: 12% [?]

Faceoff: Low-cost vector design apps

While I’m not a hard-core professional illustrator or cartoonist, I do use vector design tools almost every day. Designing logos, playing with type, and creating quick layouts are things every vector design tool should do well.

Adobe Illustrator CS3, of course, is the 800-pound gorilla in this field, and it’s my tool of choice. But there are plenty of people who don’t need the extensive functionality that Illustrator provides. Plus, Illustrator is something of a resource hog (right now, it’s using 176MB of real memory and 1.21GB of virtual memory on my system).

Today, I’m going to review four leaner, lower-cost (or free) options from four high-powered indie Mac developers: DrawBerry, EazyDraw, Lineform, and VectorDesigner. Unlike Illustrator, all of these use Mac OS X’s built-in Core Image foundation, which makes them very easy to compare to each other.

It’s high noon for vector apps, after the jump.

To test the features of the various applications, I designed a simple “Web 2.0 style” logo in Adobe Illustrator (as I might be asked to do).

To break this down into tasks, each application is expected to:

• Create a star shape with 20 points
• Inset the star shape a little
• Make a “horizon” by creating an intersecting shape
• Add transparency effects
• Add a drop shadow
• Add the “pointer” glyph from the Lucida Grande font
• Type “TUAW” using the Calibri Bold font
• Bend the crossbar of the “A” slightly
• Add gradients (yuck — but hey, it’s what the client wanted)
• Add diagonal lines behind the logo
• Make a file so I can import it into Photoshop

Now that we know what’s involved, let’s light this candle.

DrawBerry 0.5, free

DrawBerry, from Raphael Bost, is the freest application on our list, which is a big plus. And, it has a nice HUD interface, which is popular with the Mac users I know. Starting it for the first time is a little scary, though, as it looks like the HUD sneezed all over your desktop:

It offers very basic drawing tools: a rectangle tool, a circle tool, and a pen tool. The pen tool has two modes: a straight-line drawing mode, and a curves drawing mode. While I could have drawn the star shape with the straight-line drawing tool, I didn’t exactly have 16 hours to spend getting it right. Instead, I used a circle in the absence of a star or polygon tool.

Zooming in was tough, because DrawBerry offers only a loupe for getting a close look at your artwork. Most difficult of all, DrawBerry lacked an intersection tool, so I had to draw the “horizon” myself, which took precious time. Additionally, the “TUAW” text couldn’t be converted into vectors, and there was no way to apply a gradient fill to the letters.

Layers functionality was pretty nice, but items on locked layers can still be selected. This means if you have a selection that contains both locked and unlocked items, you won’t be able to move anything.

Additionally (and these are excusable, since this is free beta software, after all):

• Help isn’t available
• Clicking on the gradient swatch in the Shape palette moved the Shape palette around randomly
• Text disappears (with no clue as to where it went) if the text box is too small
• The interface few spelling problems: “Canevas”? Really?

Lastly, and sadly, the “Vectorial EPS” that DrawBerry generated was unreadable by Photoshop. Oops.

EazyDraw 2.6, $95

True to its name, EazyDraw was very easy to use. It also has charting and mathematical tools (which I’m not really covering in my test) that look very useful to someone who might need that sort of thing. At $95, it’s the most expensive app in the group.

The interface needs the attention of a qualified user experience designer. Some buttons are labeled with abbreviations like “MJ,” “Mn,” “Vt,” and “Gu” — and as much as I like Mary Jane (from Spider Man! Honest!), Minnesota, Vermont, and … uh … Guam, they’re just not right for interface buttons. The star tool is just bizarre, requiring the user to type a number (corresponding to the number of points) while they drag the star on the canvas.

The curve editing tools, on the other hand, were extremely easy to use (for the crossbar on the A), except I wasn’t able to select more than one point at the same time to move.

I also wasn’t able to add the lines behind the logo, since the maximum number of objects allowed in the demo was 35. But it looked fully capable of doing that.

Lineform 1.5, $80

Lineform, from Freeverse, comes highly rated, with a five-star review from CNet and an Apple Design Award. And as an Illustrator user, having an app that uses a lot of the same keyboard shortcuts was a blessing: it felt much faster to use than any of the others. Its feature-set was the most complete of all the tools, with a notable exception: a polygon or star tool would have made it perfect for this test.

Resizing objects is very simple — dragging a selection over multiple objects allows you resize them all at once, even. Compared to the others in the group, the align and distribute functions were much better. (Heck, they were there, which puts it a leg up.) An align and distribute toolbar would have been very helpful, though.

Editing the vector points for the crossbar of the A was a little hard to figure out, but once I did, it made good sense. (You have to convert the corner points to “curves,” and then everything will bend the way you need it to.)

Lineform had good documentation in the form of a couple of PDF files, and were written for a beginning user who wanted to get going quickly.

VectorDesigner, $70

VectorDesigner, from TweakerSoft, was just updated just a few days ago to version 1.2.0. Of the apps I tested, VectorDesigner was the only one that was able to do everything in the test (although EazyDraw is a close second — since the diagonal lines were only a limitation of the demo). The results, as you can see, are impressive.

The gradient tool in VectorDesigner is a clear winner — it was actually fun to use. Coming from someone that really doesn’t enjoy gradients very much, that’s saying something. Like the rest of the candidates in our field, VectorDesigner has very easy-to-use transparency tools, too, thanks to the Quartz foundation built into Mac OS X.

On the downside, the application becomes very, very slow when zoomed in tight on a part of your artwork. On my 2.8GHz Intel iMac (which isn’t too pokey), watching the screen redraw in response to me using the key combination to zoom in was unexpected (and made me a little nostalgic).

As an added bonus, TweakerSoft offers a suite of video tutorials on their website to get you up and running right away.

In summary, is there a clear winner? In my mind, it’s still Illustrator. For the price, though, VectorDesigner edges out EazyDraw for functionality and style. In any case, all these apps are solid options if you’re doing basic design and need to quickly make a piece of vector artwork.

Popularity: 17% [?]