News :: 15MR: WinSnap
Hello again and welcome to another edition of 15MR! Today’s application is WinSnap—A screen capture utility.
Giveaway of the Day states:
“WinSnap is a small enhancement utility for taking and editing screenshots. It can easily capture windows of non-rectangular form with the background of your choice, automatically perform simple canvas transformations and coloring effects, add professional smoothing shadows in Photoshop style and more. Also it supports variety of image formats and provides advanced auto-save features.”
“WinSnap can help you make small thumbnail previews and full-sized screenshots for your web blog or home page, visualize technical and educational materials, send reduced-size images through email.”
Quick Pros:
- Nice set of quick style
- Ability to select what type of screenshot on the fly (Keyboard shortcuts)
- Decent screenshot quality
- Watermarks which are placed relative % or fixed
- Auto-saving & auto-copying features
- Retained settings
Quick Cons:
- Settings a lot to wade through for a screenshot application
- Too many keyboard shortcuts for all the styles and no way to set quickly what the straight PrintScreen button does
- Capture mode: dropdown box: Does it do anything? Doesn’t seem to change a thing, and resets after each screenshot. Figured this would change the Print Screen button, but doesn’t
- Some of the Settings should be right on the front page (Include mouse cursor, shortcuts to Blending/Canvas/Watermark/Image, etc)
- Has a “kludgy” feel to it
Quick Expansion
Not too much else to say quickly here than what stated above. I’ve used a range of applications before for this same purpose. For the purpose of this review, I kept focussed on this application alone and kept all other screen capture applications out of my head; However, the one thing that did pop into my head comparatively is how clunky the interface is. Some people (myself included) want or need a little speed to this process and is thought it shouldn’t be a drawn out process. This application makes the process feel like a bit of a chore. While the auto-save/auto-copy features help significantly, these features only seem really useful if you are taking a bank of screenshots making it worthwhile to enter that state.
My biggest peeve is the Capture mode: dropdown box. I know it must do something, but its nothing you would intend. For all purposes, its busted. My first thought is that it would quickly set the Print Screen hotkey to any one of those, which would be the greatest feature. Nope, not it. Maybe you could change WHAT the application took already, which would be really cool if you already took a screenshot, won’t get it again and you want to optimize it. Nope, not it either. Maybe it will do the same thing as the Capture menu, allowing you to click on a menuitem, then if it requires a window selection your next window selection will snapshot, and other cool hidden little features. Nope, not it either. That box resets to whatever screenshot you just took, and that seems like ALL it does. For the purposes of a 15-minute review, I didn’t have the time to go hunting for what it does in a manual (Which when I’m done writing this, I will go and do it and probably add to the article later), but for now it is an irritant at best. If all it was, was an informational box, why not just place text right on the form with a pretty box around it, instead of making the user think it is useful.
Final Verdict
Okay, here it is. I’ve used many freeware screencapture apps throughout the time. While this one is feature-rich, it makes you work for these features, instead of work for you. While I am going to keep it on my system as since I haven’t installed one since my last reinstall, it will probably get set aside until I start doing screenshots for this site.
Even though I seem to dislike it, you might as well pick it up for free while you can; the watermark, shadowing and dynamic form sizes make it a ‘decent’ freeware application. As of right now, I probably couldn’t recommend purchasing this application UNLESS you like how it is laid out, or you need some of the advanced features. If you need watermarking, rotation, scaling, contouring, or like the coloring and shadowing features, it may be nice to get if you can get past the interface. While it is licenced software, it is considered voluntary for personal use; meaning that you don’t have to register to use the full-featured application IF it is for personal use. This may be the only reason I am suggesting to keep this application in mind in the future if you do need some of these advanced features.
Freeware Alternatives
(And yes, I do use SnapFiles to find them quickly—this is a 15-minute review afterall ;) )
Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, January 31, 2007
