SnagIt++

I blogged on TechSmith's delightful SnagIt application almost a year ago and have been using it daily ever since. SnagIt is one of those applications that's kind of hard to describe (why would anyone spend money for something like this when you get Print Screen and Paint for free with Windows, right?) but once you start using it you wonder how you ever lived without it. Every blog post that you've seen here[1] that has screen shots has been written with the help of SnagIt.

And now it's gotten a lot better.

Last month TechSmith released SnagIt version 9, with a whole slew of new features and capabilities. There are too many to list here, so you can check out the What's New page if you're interested - the thing that blows me away is the capture organizer - when you capture an image, it goes into a tray where you can save it, edit it, delete it or just plain ignore it if you're not ready to do anything else just yet. This provides an amazing degree of flexibility, and makes working with a large number of captures (such as documenting a I workflow through still images) a trivial task.

As a case in point, my last blog post has a total of 19 screen captures, some of which were taken out of order[2]. Think about how you would traditionally do that; if you're like me,this would involve saving the files with sequentially-numbered file names, and then re-naming them as necessary. With SnagIt 9 this was simply a matter of capturing all of the images I thought I might need, deleting the ones I didn't need, and then saving the ones I decided to use once all of the writing was done. I love it.

And the best thing is that TechSmith offers a free trial version for download, and the full version is only $49.95. And no, they're not paying me anything for this recommendation - SnagIt is just one of those tools that I use every day that not enough people seem to know. Check it out and see for yourself!

 

[1] Or forum posts, book chapters, or articles - anything!

[2] I inadvertently created the variables I used for this post at the wrong scope, so I ended up going back and deleting and recreating them, and had to re-capture all of the images of the Variables window. What a pain.