TipCam

TipCam got the basics of screen recording right with its medium-glossy freeware beta, and it has a few tricks all its own. You'll be able to start, pause, delete, and preview your screencasts from the small recording controls window, even draw on annotations while you record. Brilliantly, if you press the hot key to zoom in, the zoom window will follow your mouse until or unless you lock it in place. Unfortunately, the TipCam control panel doesn't do so well. If you're not careful, it might inadvertently star in your screencast. After you become familiar with the icons, it's best to switch to mini mode.

You can configure TipCam to capture your audio recordings, as well. While there's no post-production studio for cleaning up audio if you mess up, you can rerecord your narrative with the voice-over tool. It's not perfect, but it's better than having to rerecord takes. A separate audio track would be ideal.

TipCam's best surprises let you record remote screens using a VNC server, and deliver uploads to UtipU.com, to YouTube (you can set this as a default), or as a private link that will load in your default e-mail client. If only TipCam would get some post-production tools, it could take on its better-established competition.