Two Bars

The VokoscreenNG user interface shows a vertical bar with control elements next to the horizontal bar at startup time. Use the vertical bar to connect the system camera or an external camera as a frame within a frame. The webcam table lets you choose one of three selectable sizes for the recording (Figure 5).

Figure 5: In the first tab of the vertical bar, you select the camera and elect to invert or decolorize the image. If required, you can display the webcam window in three formats up to 640 x 480 pixels.

The info tab, which might be better described as a log, contains full details of the current session. It also offers the option of sending data to the developer to help with troubleshooting. In almost all tabs, you will find small info icons on the right-hand side. Clicking on the icon brings up a window with helpful information on the function.

At the bottom of the window, you will see another control bar with five buttons Start, Stop, Pause, Play, and Folder in all tabs of the horizontal bar. The last button refers to the default directory $HOME/Video, where VokoscreenNG stores its recordings.

You can play back the recordings via the fairly simple integrated player or call up a dialog via Folder to use an external player. In this case, the globally specified application for the format comes into play.

If desired, you can control VokoscreenNG via keyboard shortcuts. Use Ctrl+Shift+F10 to start a recording, Ctrl+Shift+F11 to stop it, or Ctrl+Shift+F12 to pause it.

Conclusions

VokoscreenNG mainly does what it is supposed to do. A few small inconsistencies are probably due to this being an early version. In multiple-screen environments, the magnifying glass only works on the first screen.

In our lab, it was a bit annoying that the magnifying glass window only opened on the second display and could not be moved to the first display. Getting it to the right place required some practice. The countdown timer also only displayed on the second screen, which caused the program to record the second screen instead of the first. And some of the small info icons do not have any content as yet.

Other than these minor issues, VokoscreenNG handled the basic functions very solidly and did not show any weaknesses in the test.