Japagoge

A user may want to record their screen for a variety of reasons: creating a tutorial, trying to troubleshoot an issue, or presenting something. The idea is that there are a bunch of use cases where a screen recorder utility comes in handy, and there's a wide selection of software on the market for all kinds of users and uses.

Taking a bit of a different approach is Japagoge, which is a screen recording tool that records animated PNG and GIF files, as a departure from the conventional MP4 and other such video formats. Depending on your use cases, this can be a great thing — or the other way around.

There's no setup or anything like that to go through with this program, so you can get straight to recording. Before you do that, though, it's best you modify the proportions of the recording area, so that whatever you want to record is properly framed. Besides that, you don't much have to bother with configuring anything: click the Record button, and do your thing.

After you're done with the recording, the app will save your file as an animated PNG. As stated before, this can be both a good and bad thing, depending on the user: if you're looking to upload your screen recordings to YouTube, this one is not for you. But if you're looking to quickly share your screen recordings with your friends, on a forum or messaging platform, or more easily upload them to cloud storage, that's where this format really shines.

The Settings menu contains a few options that can be configured. Setting up a temp folder, as well as implementing delays for your recording, can make the program better correspond with your workloads.

Users can also omit showing the mouse cursor in recordings, as well as modify the color filter: RGB, grayscale, amber, black and white, and other similar filters can be utilized. There's also a setting called Better RGB colors in GIF, which enhances the contrast and saturation of your recordings.

For the intended user, Japagoge is a great program. It doesn't require much — if any — tinkering, and is a no-nonsense screen recorder, with a sharp focus on lightweight recordings.