Citrix just entered the screencasting market with its GoView application for Windows. GoView, which was launched at the DEMO conference today, allows you to record demos on your screen and Citrix will host these videos for you. Unlike most of Citrix’s offerings, GoView is available for free. While the tool is easy enough to use, its feature set lags behind its direct competitors like Jing or ScreenToaster. However, while it doesn’t offer a lot of new features, it is very easy to use and will surely attract a large number of users.
Easy to Use – But Lacks Features
GoView’s advantage over its competitors is the sheer simplicity of the service: you press record and that’s what it does. After you stop the recording, you are taken to GoView’s website, where you can add a title and description to your video. You can also password protect your video and see a preview.
However, unlike other tools like ScreenToaster, or Techsmith’s Jing and Camtasia Studio, GoView feels somewhat limited. As far as we can see, you can’t even set a keyboard shortcut to start your recordings, and you can’t specify a specific area of your screen for your recordings – your only option is to record the whole screen.
GoView does, however, allow you to cut out sections of your recordings later on and let you add titles to your video later on. Sadly, it doesn’t allow you to overdub your voice-over recordings after your original recording.
However, just like most other screencasting tools, GoView also gives you the option to download a video file with your presentation, which means that you could edit it in your favorite video editor after the fact.
GoView is free and has Citrix’s brand name and infrastructure behind it, but products like Screentoaster or Jing also give you free hosting for your videos and more powerful recording features. In its current iteration, GoView’s web service was also often very slow, but that might be due to the high demand just after today’s launch. Overall, GoView is a useful product, but it doesn’t do anything that others don’t do already.
