Kap For Mac

The Apple vetted media application, QuickTime Player, comes with screen recording capabilities, and you can choose to grab the entire screen or only a particular area. The selection process is quite intuitive, and the video can be saved locally as an MOV file.

However, the QuickTime Player does not come with predefined aspect ratio layouts or the possibility to manually set precise dimensions. This is where the small Kap app comes in.

Right off the bat, Kap places a small menulet in your status bar designed to grant easy access to the app’s configuration panel.

The Kap’s crop tool enables you to select the area you want to capture, either by using free-hand handles or by expanding the Controls panel to get access to the predefined aspect ratio layouts.

Kap features 4 layout presets (1:1 - 512x512, 4:3 - 1024x768, 5:4 - 1280x1024, 16:9 - 1600x900), but also provides support for manually inserting custom values.

To streamline the layout configuration process, Kap helps you switch or further manipulate the width and height parameters with simple mouse clicks.

The Kap layout guidelines will remain visible at all times, and the video will include the mouse movements, even though mouse clicks are not signaled in any way. To stop the recording, just press the Kap button placed in the status bar.

Worth mentioning is that, even though the Kap panel features time and size counters for the recorded videos, you will not be able to see the information: you cannot open the pane without stopping the recording. What’s more, the app automatically resets the counters as the video gets prepared to be exported.

Bottom line, Kap is a simple tool for creating screen recordings that helps you follow precise instructions when it comes to setting the parameters for the capture layout.

At the same time, Kap outputs the recording using the MP4 standard instead of the MOV file format used by default by the QuickTime Player.