ReadWriteWeb

One of my favorite blogs to peruse now and then for amazing advice on web design is Webdesigner Depot which produces excellent in depth guides for various design related issues. Monday they produced an excellent in depth post that provides a step-by-step breakdown of best practices for creating a screen-cast for a Web page, a feature many startups like to include on their homepage to familiarize new visitors with their product.

Aviary, which is known for its fully featured, browser-based image creation and manipulation tools, just released a new tool that makes it extremely easy to capture a copy of any web page by just adding 'aviary.com/' in front of a URL. Unlike most screen capture tools, Aviary is able to capture a complete web site, even if it extends beyond the borders of your screen. Aviary already offered a Firefox plugin, Talon, which allows users to create screenshots, but this new method is available from any browser, as long as it supports Flash for the image editing portion of Aviary.

Jing has consistently been one of our favorite screenshot and screencasting tools here at ReadWriteWeb (especially among the Windows users). With one simple tool, you can take screenshots or record videos and save them to your computer or upload them to online services like flickr, YouTube, and TechSmith's own Screencast.com.

Today, with the launch of Jing 2.1, both Jing and Jing Pro users are getting a bevy of new features which makes the little app we can't live without just that much better.

Citrix just entered the screencasting market with its GoView application for Windows. GoView, which was launched at the DEMO conference today, allows you to record demos on your screen and Citrix will host these videos for you. Unlike most of Citrix's offerings, GoView is available for free. While the tool is easy enough to use, its feature set lags behind its direct competitors like Jing or ScreenToaster. However, while it doesn't offer a lot of new features, it is very easy to use and will surely attract a large number of users.

ScreenToaster is an easy to use screencasting application that lives in your browser. When we first reviewed it, it was still in private beta, but today, the company has started its public beta test and added enough new features to make it a viable competitor to Jing, one of our favorite screencasting tools. Besides adding new features, ScreenToaster has also retooled its video portal, which, as Amit Agarwal notes, now looks a lot like a YouTube for screencasts.