Istanbul receives overhaul

Istanbul is a simple "desktop session recorder" that allows you to create screencasts. It sits in your notification area, and to use it, you simple click its icon. Its simplicity gave it the potential to become a very useful tool.

However, over the past year it had fallen out of date and contained many bugs, pretty much making it unusable in Ubuntu 6.06 - until now. The creator, Zaheer Abbas Merali, has blogged that Istanbul has just received a UI overhaul and can now record 3D applications as well as composited environments (eg. XGL). For now, if you'd like to try out these updates, you'll have to use the bleeding-edge CVS version, but you can look forward to them in the next release.

Update: That's what I get for writing this article a week ago, but only posting it now - Istanbul 2.0 has been released.