Screencasting Software

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.^[1][2] 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.

Just as a screenshot is a picture of a user's screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on their monitor.

---Wikipedia

Since 2004, screencasting has become a serious mode of knowledge transmission, largely because it fits so well with the free-for-all, learn it when you need it, rich-media intensive style of today's Web.  Perhaps even more important to its success is the emergence of software capable of dynamically capturing screen activity, combining it with other media, and rendering the results publishable in many forms.  Camtasia is the best-known and most successful of this breed, but there are others that came before or since -- some free or less expensive, and some that, unlike Camtasia, work on the Mac.  We'll talk about this kind of software in this section.