I’m a technical writer, and I use Snag-It on a daily basis, though I know I haven’t even scratched the surface of this great tool. It is an excellent, intuitive way to get great-looking screenshots, and to edit the shot to bring out important aspects of the user interface. PhotoShop is great, but its complexity is too much when it comes to editing a screenshot. Snag-it does its job well and with finesse!

I don’t have a screen capture comparison chart, but I would sure be interested if there is one.

Snagit is the winner when it comes to graphic implementation into the screen captures, such as including arrows, callouts etc. I have tested a few other tools and nothing comes close to it.

I will send you an email now, with a few examples.

All the best,
Peter – Your Snagit Guide

Wanted to know about how callouts, arrows, etc. work. On the tech communicators Yahoo HATT listserve, good answers today to my question:

“What is best screen capture app for arrows, callouts, etc.?”

Snagit wins hands down, with about 5 posts so far.

Is there any site that compares screen capture apps side by side?

I like it a lot, but I dont like the new interface at all, prefer the old one!

I don’t like the look and feel of the interface (does everything in UI design these days have to be so shiny and obtrusive?); and I don’t like how slow it is compared to the smaller, more stripped-down GPS. I don’t use half the features in it.

Also, one thing that GPS does that SnagIt does not do is let you drop the border of your capture onto what you’re capturing, and then manually adjust it by dragging and dropping the capture borders, rather than the sort of “elastic” feel that the SnagIt capture has, where it takes. I don’t like that SnagIt takes the capture automatically as soon as you release the mouse button. My fine motor control is not that good (minor physical disability), and, while it doesn’t get in the way most of the time, I’ve ruined more screencaps by “missing” with SnagIt than I care to count.

I don’t suppose you’d consider adding that as an option, would you?

Otherwise, it’s terrific. I’ve been using it for maybe six years, and have no complaints. It’s the ONLY tool that could grab our more-than-one-screen shots (scrolling) in our very wordy application.

I love being able to define my capture, a window, the screen, an area on the screen, drop down lists, etc. I also love being able to use features to apply formatting (borders, etc.) to a list of images, batch convert images to another image file format, callouts, etc.

I also really like Camtasia and have used it several times to create short screen demos that I can then put in the online help.

It’s one tool that techwriters should always have.

Why isn’t capturing “Multiple CAPTURES” in the TOC? I’ve found capturing multiple AREAS (of a screen) and Multiple Captures should follow that topic in the TOC.

The only way I have been able to find the instructions for capturing mulitple windows and auto-naming them is to search and then plow through all the search results until I find the instructions. They are not in a really intuitive place, and I don’t do this often enough to remember how to do it every time.

Other than that, I really prefer Snag-It over any other tool to get and edit my screen captures. I used to be a big Full-Shot fan, but Snag-It has overtaken and passed them now.

Snag-It has everything else I need to get captures and fix them up for documentation.

Just please add Multiple Captures into the TOC –> Capture Input –> Capture Mode and Input Combinations –> Capturing Multiple Windows (Objects?) Sequentially with Autonumbering.

Thanks for a great product!