I’ve always admired utility apps that do just one thing, but do it particularly well. Going back into the mists of time, I remember that the first app in this category was XTree, way back in my computing youth. Remember XTree? (Best not admit it, you’ll be giving your age away!).
I also have a spiffy little image optimizer utility which as they say in the advert in the UK “Does what it says on the tin” – it optimises images by compressing them with minimum quality loss.
But just recently I came upon one of the best examples of this category that I’ve seen for a while. Snagit from TechSmith.com. This utility’s main purpose in life is to enable you to take screen shots and save them to file. Doesn’t sound too exciting, I know, but over the years I’ve struggled to make use of some truly awful, non-intuitive “helper” applications in this speciality field (naming no names).
The folks at Techsmith have devised just about every option you could think of (and a few that I hadn’t!) when it comes to grabbing bits of screen real estate and saving them. It does all the usual stuff you would expect: grabbing a screen, an object, a window, a rectangle, a freehand region, and (very impressive, I thought) was the ability to grab a complete image of a scrolling window.
And it will also pull all text from a screen, all images from a web page and even make an AVI Video from a screen . Global hot keys make using it too easy to be true.
Editing facilities are included to make it easy to add callouts, arrows and so on. What I really appreciate though is that they haven’t fallen into the trap of making bloat ware. They know what Snagit is meant to do and they stuck to that specialisation.
It’s a really good utility that falls straight into my "how did I ever manage without this?" category.
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* Not expecting to get many hits, I thought I'd Google for Xtree. I should have known better - 115,000 hits, including an Xtree Fan Site (!) and lots of Xtree 21st Century update wannabes.
** I should maybe explain the title. I guess it reflects something about the differences in international English. In my part of the UK, the meaning of a "snag" is "problem" or "difficulty", so "Snagit Without Snags" is ..... oh I'm sure you don't need me to explain :-}