Named & Shamed

Junk Offender: litecam

Iwant the tools I install to make my life easier, not more complicated. Shame about litecam HD ( www. litecam.net), then, which I thought might be a useful tool for recording my screen, but instead turned out to be a complete pain in the posterior.

The free program has one of the most absurdly convoluted installation procedures I’ve endured in a long time. For a start, you’re obliged to enter your email address (see screenshot), virtually guaranteeing yourself a flood of future spam. Then, after wading through a few more screens, you need to request a verification code (sent to the email address you entered), then type this into the program.

I can understand why this might be necessary if you’re installing a paid-for program, but why for a free tool (other than to hand over your email to all those future spammers)?

Finally, after entering the verification code, installation is complete. Except it isn’t, because you’re then faced with a message telling you that you need to download a separate MP3 encoder so you can record audio, which you then need to unzip and carefully place into the correct folder.

But at least it was worth all this effort, right? Well, after all that faffing about, it turns out that litecam HD slaps a dirty great watermark over any screen recordings you make, which in any case are restricted to 10 minutes, unless you cough up £16 for the full version.

Oh, and guess what? Litecam HD also left a load of junk behind on my hard drive when I (inevitably) uninstalled it.