ScreenFlow will record everything from your iSight camera to microphone audio or speaker audio enabling you to add crystal clear commentaries to your screencasts. ScreenFlow even monitors keystrokes and mouse movements, which is pretty clever. The app also has an excellent zoom function which allows you to add a touch of class and professionalism to your screencasts.

Recording quality is excellent, and thanks to a high frame-rate (which you can set), your videos look as if everything was actually happening on your screen. What's also surprising is that ScreenFlow is very lightweight for what is effectively a video editor, consuming relatively few CPU and RAM resources. Exporting is possible in all major formats and YouTube fans can now share their productions instantly.

The program has one glaring drawback however and that's that you can't add text, subtitles or simple text annotations to your beautifully produced screencasts. It's also a bit on the pricey side but if you're looking to produce professional looking screencasts, it's probably worth it.

ScreenFlow is an excellent screencasting application that just lacks text insertion support to make it a truly excellent application.

Download ScreenFlow 4.0.3 in Softonic

Perfect for preparing screencasts or tutorials, Screenium is accessible to any user. You can choose from four different capture selections: fixed area, full screen, mouse area, and single window. The application can also follow your mouse movements around and you can record using a time delay. Screenium includes different presets for image quality and file size, depending on what sort of video you're looking. We were a bit disappointed by the default video quality so we definitely recommend checking them out to find the one suited to your needs.

Screenium handles multi-channel audio recording so you can add multiple sounds, music and voice recordings to your video. Users will also find some handy keyboard shortcuts for the basic recording operations. A cool little feature is being able to add "hottext", a little bubble of text that appears in your video.

On the downside, when recording with a selected area, we were disappointed by the lack of borders and indications to remind you what you're recording. Similarly, the sliders to adjust the area felt a bit unintuitive.

Screenium offers a streamlined interface which makes recording your screen easy and quick. We'd recommend it to beginners who want a simple tool to make video recordings quickly. More practical than Mac's Grab tool and simpler than advanced recording applications like Snapz, Screenium is a good alternative to start with. Unfortunately, the current Beta version is too buggy and not stable enough. We hope future release will allow us to record screen activity without any trouble.

Despite being a little buggy, Screenium is a friendly application to record any area of your screen.

Download Screenium 1.5 in Softonic

DesktopRecorder is a free desktop recorder for Macs which records both images and sounds in a simple handy app.

All you need to do is select the compression rate and number of frames per second you want your screencast to be in and you're ready to go. It's a very simple piece of desktop recording software but as noted above, so is Quicktime X which does exactly the same job and offers slightly more power than DesktopRecorder.

If you don't have OS X 10.6+ and QuickTime X installed, then DesktopRecorder is a very useful screen recording tool.

Download DesktopRecorder 1.0 in Softonic

The answer is Jing! - produced by the same developers Techsmith who also made Camtasia (which isn't a Disney movie by the way). Firstly, it should be made clear that Jing! is not simply SnagIt! on Mac, and more's the pity. Rather, it follows the same principles, with a completely different interface, less power, but more or less the same ease of use and access.

Once installed, what looks like a sun peeps out of the top right hand corner. You hover the mouse over the sun to reveal the screen selector which acts like a cross hair that you drag across the part of the screen you want to capture. Once captured, Jing! saves the image and gives you the option of whether to send it to screencast.com to share with others or, simply to disk.

Alternatively, you can also choose to capture video from your desktop as a video cast. Jing features limited editing tools like text, color or arrows but what it really lets itself down on is a resizing. resizing in SnagIt was so easy, and that's what I miss the most.

Jing is still prone to crashes and it's not as powerful as SnagIt! but as a simple capturing tool that comes close, it's still a great product from Techsmith.

Download Jing 2.5.47113 in Softonic

Recording itself is fairly easy, and you can resize the recording space anytime or even opt for 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 or full screen sizes. Recording quality is good and you can set Screenflick up to capture up to 30 rates per second, quite sufficient for a computer screen. One minor drawback to the program is that neither a Dock nor a menu bar item show up when you launch. As the developer writes on his page though, you can always activate the program by pressing Shift-Command-2.

A good application to familiarize yourself with screencasts.

Download Screenflick 1.6.9 in Softonic

This simple little application monitors all your screen actions and automatically compresses your movie thanks to double buffering. It's perfect if you just want to quickly record what's going on on your desktop, like playing back how an error occurs or doing a quick screencast. Recordings are smooth and of good quality.

The settings are a little limited but still let you configure a number of things. The application only offers two ouput resolutions: full screen and fixed. However for the second choice you'll be able to adjust height and width yourself. We were also positively surprised by the wide selection of codecs you can choose from. You'll also be able to set frame rate and select from six different quality levels.

Although its settings are somewhat limited, xGRab is a good application to record your screen in a snap. It also offers a good range of codecs.

Download xGrab 1.0.3 in Softonic

You can upload and email screenshots instantly due to a multithreaded code and a 64-bit enabled compression system. Sequence can handle capturing DVDs, audio and most multimedia. It's ideal for making screencasts because a voice recording function allows you to describe what you are doing on your screen using your Mac's internal microphone.

However, due to the compression used, the quality of the video or audio isn't great after recording. There is no way to change the file type that is saved to your hard drive and so it's not particularly flexible either. Sequence is fine for those that just need to make a basic video screencast or recording. However, for professional needs, the quality it provides may not be enough.

Sequence is a handy tool for anyone that wants to produce screencasts or multimedia grabs on the fly.

Download Sequence 2.5.3 in Softonic