TapeX review
Even though for many of us, normality is slowly returning, there are some practices we may never fully lose now. Remote working will certainly be more commonplace in an ever growing online world, so naturally, a lot of how we accomplish our work will be through video chats and shared screens. Well in that respect, the latest Tool of the Week might be an ideal accoutrement (apologies, my French is not perfect) to your working routine. TapeX is a screen recording service that allows you to draw, annotate and record your screen for the purpose of work collaboration, it has a few features that help accelerate and facilitate optimal remote working.
TapeX is currently in early access, but is free to download for Windows or Mac, simply install the software, double-click, and their nifty TapeX widget appears on the screen. You can also connect TapeX to Slack, if you are so inclined, which is a useful addition! Your TapeX widget houses several buttons, the top button is an icon consisting of six dots, this is so you can move your widget around, useful if not very exciting.
To start recording your screen, click the play button three options down, and select the second play button that appears. If you wish to open a video chat window, select the video icon after you have first clicked play and you can add a rounded video window, and fit it for size! TapeX’s remit is limitless screen recording, as they believe current services don’t give you the freedom they feel you should. For annotations, select the pen icon and pick your colour, if you’re collaborating we would recommend using different colours so you can distinguish your annotations. But you do you, don’t let us tell you how to live your life! We think TapeX is best if you just keep trying various aspects and features to get a good feel for its interface, it’s not confusing, but maybe not as obvious as it can be, it could do with some text to accompany the icons in our opinion.
TapeX is free, unlimited and covers recordings, annotations, screen and voice recording. You can also save your voice tracks straight to your computer if you’re looking to revisit your words dictaphone style. It’s an all-rounder, it looks nice, the widget is smart and fairly easy to use so we’re impressed if not over-awed. One definite negative and we feel it’s enough to be frustrated with, is that when your widget is active, you can’t alternate between tabs or windows, and we found we had to close TapeX down completely to do this, which is a shame. We hope this is something that is rectified in the future.
We’ve used TapeX for a few days and we think it’s neat, pretty easy to use and drawing on your screen is definitely fun, but is it an absolute game-changer? We’re not convinced just yet.
TapeX, you’ve almost got this right. You get 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼/5!