Tapes: Screencast Sharing 4+

A friend sent me a screencast made with Tapes and I was impressed by how nice it looked. I quickly purchased it. It wasn’t until I was looking into the preferences and saw that you are only permitted 60 minutes per month, and each screencast is limited to 3 minutes. While this will suffice for most folks, I was hoping to use it to support users, and find this to be a bit limiting for a $10 product. There is a way to ‘earn’ more credit per month by referring folks, but that’s a bit of a hassle, and I’d rather have the opportunity to 1) Delete a screenscast to recover the minutes. 2) Option to purchase more. 3) Have them make the threshold higher than 60 minutes.

Other than the time limitations - it’s a very nice little app.

I adobre this app and use it constantly. I use it to record quick videos for friends and family, demonstrating how to use a particular app or website. I also use it when sending bug reports to app developers, or when seeking tech support from developers. It’s one of my most valued tools.

I’ve used Tapes to build a couple of short screencasts providing some software training for student workers, and it works pretty well. This is one of those apps where the more I use it, the more I think of fun ways to use it — which is exactly as it should be. I’d rate it five stars if:

* you could record tapes longer than three minutes (although the limitation has allowed me to title my training videos “X subject in three minutes,” which is great); there are times when even an extra 30 seconds would be beneficial, and I’ve had to re-record a couple of things where waiting for load times bumped me just over the three-minute threshhold.

* you could do something with the final product other than link to it from the Tapes website; I have in the back of my head the possibility that the work I’ve done on the (admittedly few) Tapes videos I’ve made so far will go up in smoke if Pilot decides to cease development of the app.

* there’s another comment about wanting embed codes, and that’d be super-handy too.

Minor gripes though; this works great and it’s been well worth the purchase.