Kazam – making screencasting tools modern

By , Published June 29, 2010

One thing I love particularly about the Open Source community is the desire to continually improve ever aspect of the desktop – from icons to apps. This isn’t driven by the desire to increase profits (an incentive which more often that not results in a ‘if it sells, it’ll do’ approach) but by the altruistic nature to make things better because they can, and therefore should, be.

The developer behind the Wasilana mail client we shared news of a week or two hitherto has written such a gloriously reasoned post on why there is a need for new modern Screenrecording tool. His argument leads into a new project of his called Kazam.


“gtkRecordMyDesktop, Istanbul (and for the hard core!) xVidCap. The trouble is, they were created WAY before screencasting became so popular, and so try to meet the demands of an audience which has changed dramatically.”

The whole approach of Kazam reminds me of that in Shutter – it’s an all in one solution that only serves to deal with the purpose of the intended use. That’s a long winded way of saying “it does everything you it to do in one application.”

With this in mind Andrew’s approach to Kazam is to integrate the editing features a screencaster might need to apply before uploading. We’re not talking fancy titles, transitions & voice overs here but basic stuff like cropping, video quality and tools to easily export the finished cast to YouTube or Vimeo etc.

The entire post is well reasoned and food for thought so go check it out and if you’re at all interested in making Kazam the killer screencast tool it promises to be then lend a hand!
Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

No related posts.

Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • http://twitter.com/vanHoi Ivo Reumkens

    Sounds good to me! Is there already a .deb or a ppa for the programm?

  • mark

    Something about that UI in the picture is awesome, When I am using apple products I see how they got the interface right, and again, it is not wow the layout is based on … it is more like that is great and I have no clue why. like google chrome (my browser of choice) I know how people are making interfaces on Linux, I have used the tools before, and it is so easy to just place all the controls on the window, but it will never end up like the ubuntu software center, chrome, or that screenshot in this post

    • http://dylanmccall.blogspot.com/ Dylan McCall

      The trick is really simple, and really important.To separate elements in a user interface, Apple uses whitespace and varied shading. They carefully orchestrate it so things that are functionally distinct are also visually distinct, and they do it in a tangible way. They can tune the variance between elements perfectly because it isn’t artificial. What they do is also common practice in web design.In short, a painting looks really bad if you can see the artist’s heavy, pencilled, outlines behind the actual picture. Why do that for UI design?Windows until just recently, and almost every theme I’ve seen for a free desktop environment, is the horrific opposite of that. For some reason, a lot of designers think it’s necessary to use heavy lines all over the place to forcefully separate blocks of content. The result is an interface that is so busy drawing borders the content itself falls into the background.For an example, head to Appearance Preferences and change your background. Before your eye reaches the (needlessly tiny) thumbnails for backgrounds, it passes through the window border, the notebook widget’s border, the border around the icon widget, and a heavy contrast with the background of the icon view. Nicely enough, this is pretty fixable within Gtk themes. (Especially when we get rgba as a first-class citizen). Someone just needs to do it.

      • http://cldx.blogspot.com/ Joern Konopka

        Spot-on. Personally i can’t wait how the whole CSS-Theming GTK3 csstogtkrc webkitGTK RGBA and all that stuff that is pretty experimental so far will really merge into our beloved OS, it might actually become fun to design a nice Interface and know you will be able to realize it like your Mockups intended it to be.

      • https://launchpad.net/~and471 Andrew

        Damn, Dylan has figured me out :-)

      • Anonymous

        That, sir, sounds quite right.

      • Anonymous

        That, sir, sounds quite right.

  • Anonymous

    sounds good !

  • Antonio

    Until there’s actually something to download right now it may as well not exist. Otherwise, I do like the approach the developer wants to take

  • Anonymous

    not in the repos… INSTALL button please:)

    • Squiddles

      In that case, install it yourself or add it to the repos yourself. Don’t expect everyone to do everything for you.

    • Majid

      it’s just an idea .. not a real application

  • Kazade

    For the people that didn’t see, this is just a design. The application apparently doesn’t exist. Although, if someone can knock up the GUI in Glade I’ll have a go at implementing it ;)

  • rAX

    Oh, it’s a mockup! thanks for giving me hope again, I think there’re already a lot of mail applications but no working screencast application, if I were the developper I might pause Wasilana and start working on Kazam.

  • Anonymous

    I’ll be sure to check it out when it becomes finished – I was underwhelmed with the screencasting tools available (or perhaps I just did not figure out how to use them correctly).

    Taking shutter’s approach is also a good idea, shutter is quite powerful and flexible.

  • daas88

    I thought about shutter when I read about it too! this will the video-shutter ;)

  • Pingback: Kazam 0.1 available – The screencasting bar on Linux just got raised

 
App