Productivity Sauce

Need to whip up a quick screencast? You might want to use Krut for the job. This cross-platform screen recording tool has virtually no learning curve, and offers a few useful features that can help you to create high-quality screencasts with consummate ease. Krut is written in Java, so you have to install the Java Runtime Environment on your system before you can run the utility. Krut requires no installation, and you can launch the application by simply running the KRUT.jar file.

When up and running, Krut places a floating palette containing four buttons: Menu, Rec, Snap, and Cursor. The latter lets you specify the recording area, which you should do before you start the recording session. Click on the Cursor button, place the mouse cursor in the upper left corner of the area you want to record. Press and hold the Ctrl key, move the mouse cursor to the bottom right corner of the recording area and release the Ctrl key. You can then use the Snap button to take a screenshot to check whether the specified recording area covers exactly what you want. Now you are ready to start the recording session, but before you hit the Rec button, you might want to adjust a few basic settings available via the Menu button. Here you can enable or disable audio recording and show or hide the cursor. If you enable the Follow mouse option, Krut will keep focus on the mouse cursor during recording. This can come in handy when you have to record something outside the specified recording area. The Timer command lets you specify when to start and stop the recording session, while the Settings/Save Files command opens the Krut Settings window containing a few other useful options. You can modify frame rate, encoding quality, adjust audio recording parameters as well as manually specify a recording area. You can also change the default paths for saving video and audio. Once you are satisfied with the settings, press the Rec button to start a recording session. When you are done, hit the Stop button, and Krut will encode the recorded video and save the finished file in the specified location.