Camtasia for Mac arrives and brings real competition

I’ve done a good deal of screencasting, including a very popular video (the TurboGears 20 Minute Wiki) and even a screencast DVD that I offered for sale. When I first started screencasting, the only viable choice on the Mac was Snapz Pro X, a simple screen recorder. This was a far cry from Camtasia Studio on Windows, which was the top-of-the-line tool. In 2007, ScreenFlow appeared on the Mac and added an elegant editing experience to Mac screencasting that closed the gap with Camtasia enough.

That said, Mac users have been clamoring for Camtasia on the Mac for a long time. My most popular blog post since the beginning of 2006 is “Camtasia for the Mac”. In addition to a continuous stream of page views, that page also has 140 comments. It was the top hit on Google for “camtasia mac” for a long time.

At long last, Camtasia for Mac is now available. From the preview video on TechSmith’s site, you can tell that they definitely paid attention to ScreenFlow. Camtasia Mac appears to have all of the polish of ScreenFlow and brings some excellent looking new features that ScreenFlow does not have (more transitions and effects, direct publishing to YouTube).

I just noticed that Telestream has pre-announced ScreenFlow 2.0 which adds transitions and YouTube publishing. The timing of this announcement and those features clearly is a direct response to Camtasia for Mac. One thing is for certain, this competition will be good for those of us using Macs to make screencasts.

Congratulations to the hard working folks at TechSmith who have gone from being a Windows shop to producing a very slick Mac application.