Before we all get too excited about Screencasting apps for the iPad

I think that these tools are very cool. I’ve played around extensively with ScreenChomp and taken a look at a couple of others. They all basically do the same thing: they record audio and your draw-on-the-screen illustrations (usually over an image from your camera roll, if you want) and then export the result into video that you can share in a variety of ways.

That’s very cool… but it’s not screencasting.

In my mind, screencasting is the process of broadcasting whatever is on my screen (“screen” + “broadcasting” = “screencasting”) with an audio narration. On the PC side, tools like Jing, Screen-Cast-O-Matic and others let you do this very easily. But do you see the critical difference? 

Until I can record myself using (and annotating) an app running on my iPad, I don’t want to conflate screencasting with whatever it is that apps like ScreenChomp and Explain Everything do. These apps are for content creation… a particular kind of content that ties together images, animated notation and audio.

But the killer app for iPad based screencasting will be one that lets me run an app (like GarageBand, say) on my iPad while annotating on top of it and describing the process in audio.

That’s the app I want.