In the Can

As the famous saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But how many words can a video save you? A million, maybe? In many situations, a short screencast (i.e., a video of desktop events) gives a far better explanation of a problem or an action than wordy text with images. A wide range of tools is available for this purpose.

The range extends from SimpleScreenRecorder [1] to recordMyDesktop [2]. Compared with these candidates, the fairly recent Peek [3] has a very small feature set, but the program is not trying to compete with the more established applications. Originally, it simply recorded the desktop as a GIF, thus producing videos that were easy to embed into web pages. However, Peek now also supports more traditional video formats such as WebM and MP4.

Recording the Desktop

In terms of the interface, Peek is deliberately oriented on the LICEcap [4] screencast tool for Windows. The program shows a scalable transparent window that is always in the foreground on top of all your other applications. Everything inside the window frame, is grabbed as a video by the software when you click Record. After pressing Stop (Figure 1), Peek immediately saves the results on the hard disk.

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