One nice feature is the setting to allow the camera to follow your mouse. As a test I ran it on top of Garageband, which can be resource heavy, and iShowU hung in there like a champ. It doesn’t overly tax your processor and doesn’t get in the way. Once you start recording, you are free to roam your mouse over the screen while dictating into your mac with a running narration. Tweaking the frame rate and compression type, it doesn’t take long to find out what works for you. The output options are very versatile and you can make a file as big and pretty as the job requires. In very little time you’ll find yourself either using one of the many presets or perhaps tweaking it just a bit and then you are off to the races. Alternatively, the right side of the interface has a series of self describing buttons that allows you a variety of options for fine tuning the resolution, quality, audio, and export codec just to name a few. When you open it up the left side has a slew of presets that make screencasting as easy as picking a self explanatory preset and pressing “Record”. That is, while iShowU initially strikes you with its simplicity, before long you realize it is also very customizable. The interface satisfies the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us Mac users. This application, which can be found at takes all of the work out of screencasting. That is, until I started playing with iShowU. Frankly, I had no clue how this is even possible. While I have been enjoying these screencasts for sometime now, I never really thought much about making one myself. Really the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Another example would be to make a private tutorial, like to show your Mac Mom how to attach a picture to an email. Make a screencast of yourself using iLife and send it to him. Or perhaps you have a friend who needs some gentle persuasion why OS X is the way to go. I’ve written those long convoluted developer emails and I’m betting if I had just sent a screencast things would have been easier for everyone involved. For instance, if you are having some strange application behavior, why not screencast it and send it to the developer. While making screencasts to help fellow mac users understand their computers is great, there are a lot of other good reasons for a screencast. There are some excellent podcasts that do this along with a few other folks who just post them on their websites. These are a sort of on-screen video where some generous soul walks you through the operation of a specific application or nuance of OS X. In case you’ve never seen one, a screencast is essentially a moving screen capture. One of the things I quickly gravitated to after joining the world of macintosh, was screencasts.
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