Loom

Loom records your screen and your face, uploads while you talk, and puts a link on your clipboard the moment you stop. That is the whole product and it has not needed to be more. The trick is that a five-minute recording replaces a thirty-minute call for anything that is "let me show you".

How I use it

Walkthroughs, first. When I hand something over, whether that is a dashboard, a folder structure or a script someone else will run, I record myself using it once and send the link. The other person watches at double speed, pauses where they need to, and asks about the one part that was unclear instead of the whole thing. I do not have to be awake in their time zone.

Second, and this took me years to notice, the library. I have recorded hundreds of these over the years, and they are the only honest record of what I thought at the time. The transcript is searchable, so when I wonder why something was built a certain way, I search a keyword and watch myself explain it to someone two years ago. Notes would have been better. Notes did not get written. The recordings did, because they were the work itself.

What surprised me is how often the act of recording finds the bug. Explaining a thing out loud to an imagined viewer is a review, and I have stopped recordings halfway to fix what I had just noticed.

What annoys me: the free plan is tight, with short recordings and a small cap, so the moment it is useful you pay. The price went up after the company was bought, and the per-seat model is odd for a tool one person uses to talk at many. The Mac app is heavier than a screen recorder should be, and occasionally it decides the microphone is not there.

Who it is for

Anyone who works with people they do not sit next to. If you only need an occasional screen capture, the recorder built into your operating system is fine. If you explain things for a living, in any sense, the archive alone justifies it.