Who would have guessed that video would be such a big part of the web and our lives at the moment? Mobile phones capture the stuff, upmarket pro digital cameras from companies like Nikon do it as well, and now even watches, sunglasses and pens can capture video on demand. It’s a candid camera era folks.

This little freeware app called Webcam Timelapse takes the whole video thing a stage further by letting you capture timelapse video footage with the webcam in your laptop or desktop computer. Timelapse photography is that cool arty stuff where the video is captured frame by frame over a period of time, then speeded up on playback, to deliver a video movie which can be absolutely stunning.

You can do all sorts of clever things with the tool, including taking a daily self portrait at a particular time (great for impressing the boss with how hard you’re working at midnight) and you can also set the timelapse period from seconds to days for all sorts of great effects. Watching flowers grow is always a good one.