15-Minute Reviews :: SnapLogger Pro v1.1 (Quick)

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is SnapLogger Pro version 1.1 by Uconomix Technologies – An application to take screenshots of your screen at specified intervals and plays back like a video for later review.

This is a quick review as since there does not appear to be conciderable changes since the previous version. You can see the previous review by clicking here

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Need help filling up your timesheet or billing a client? If you can’t remember how you spent your day when it comes to filling up a timesheet at your workplace or calculating billable hours for a client, SnapLogger can help.

SnapLogger is computer activity tracking software for Windows that helps you remember how and where you spent your time. It records on screen activities as screenshots and plays it back like a movie showing what you did the whole day.

This software is a boon to those professionals who work most of the time on computer and they need to know what they did the whole day to fill up the timesheet or bill a client.”

Quick Pros

• Filters to allow or deny recording of specific applications
• Automatically clean up old snapshots older than a specified number of days
• Password-protect your screenshots
• Capture can collect entire screen or only active window
• Capture process also captures date/time as well as what program was active
• Can convert images to a video file (Handy if you have password on application)

Quick Cons

• System tray icon needs to be more powerful
• While there has been processes added to extract screenshots, still no saving
• Password protection works, but kills using the files outside of SnapLogger
• Hefty memory usage – Cyclic

Expansion

Since my last review, which I do recommend to get an idea of the pros and cons of the application, there has been a few changes made to this application; Many of which have improved on the functionality of the application.

First off, there is now functionality in the View SnapLog area in which you can both move the snapshot to the clipboard or create a video file with the snapshots; These new options can be found on the ‘Action’ button. The video option is handy – The application creates an AVI file with the slides 3 seconds apart; This gives you enough time to see each slide and what is on it as well as enough time to pause, as well as an accelerated view of your day. However, if you stayed at the stock 30 seconds screenshots for the initial recording, it would still take 48 minutes of video for an 8 hour day. As well, if you are looking to archive these videos, the videos themselves are a good size. I ran the snapshots at an accelerated pace on a display resolution of 1024×768 to hit 960 frames (30 second snapshots for 8 hours is 960 frames) and converted it to video; The resulting video was 246MB. Besides the video function, there is also the ability to copy the snapshots to the clipboard; This is great for pasting it into applications that will take it. I would much prefer to be able to just save the image for attachment to an email or otherwise.

Another feature that has appeared in this application is that when you do begin recording, a pop-up balloon appears to tell you such with a close box on it. This is good move in the right direction, but I think a simple icon change (blue screen to a red screen or something similar) would do much better to alert the user to recording.

My biggest concern with the last version still exists in this application unfortunately. There is a cyclic memory use while taking screenshots. While the application looked a bit more promising during my first testing of the application, with the application at first only climbing to 54MB memory usage, after leaving this run for a few moments, the cyclic action did climb to a max of 70MB usage, before dropping back down to 43MB usage. On a system with 512MB RAM (Or even 1GB) this is a fairly hefty chunk of memory to be chewing off. The memory climbs (with my test system – Likely dependent on screen resolution) approximately 6MB every time a screenshot is taken by the application until it seems to hit a specific point and then the memory is quickly purged back down to its lower state, doing this over and over while recording. This could cause performance issues, especially with those who may be nearing their memory capacity and beginning to use their swap space.

Final Verdict

While the application is making moves in the right direction, improving in functionality and use, the application does still need more maturing in my opinion. For free, this application may still be worth taking a look at, but keep in mind the memory issues noted above. As for paying $19.95 while I did have concerns with the memory usage, if you feel that you can recover at least one hour of billable time with using this application without causing yourself a loss of productivity, it may be worth it to you. Best thing I can suggest is try it first; The publisher offers a free version as well with a few less of the functions, and also a 15-day trial; I would suggest using that first.

Be sure to check out the review of version 1.0 for more information on the application

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, November 30, 2007