Grabbing screens
Another nice little freeware app some people might be interested in for taking screenshots.
Writing up some documentation recently, I was getting fed up with using Windows built in screen shot (by hitting Print Screen), then pasting it into a new image in Fireworks (one of those RAM hungry monsters), cropping it and doing whatever to it, and then saving it somewhere to use.
So I went looking for something easier and nicer to use. I’m pleased to say, I found the very easy, and nice to use Screenshot Pilot for free!
I like little apps that make things easy, doing what you want them to do, but with enough flexability to be useful in different situations.
Screenshot Pilot seems to be one of them.
You open it up, and it only takes a few seconds to work out that you have a few options on what to take a screen shot of. You can either manually select an area, or choose to take shots of a window, or just part of a window (a menu bar perhaps, or the contents of the window, without the titlebar, toolbars etc…), full screen or whatever.
Select your option, click start capture, Screenshot Pilot hides itself, letting you choose what you want to capture, then pops up again, with the image there, ready to use when you do.
If that’s all you want, just click save, and save it! Quite happily saving with various formats.
There are a few little things you can do to the images, but generally, that’s probably not something you need much, other than perhaps resizing them.
The only catch here, is that you start taking screenshots really easily, but then start wanting to annotate them, so you end up opening them in an image editor anyway, to do that.
The makers of Screenshot Pilot have addressed this, with an app called Annotation Pilot. Building on the Screenshot functionality to allow you to add annotations as well. Though that one’s not free, costing US$30, I’ve not tried, but am tempted to give it a go.
As a no-nonesense screenshot taker, this app does the business, with enough flexability to meet various screenshot requirements. For that reason, I like it, and recommend it to you.