There are many screen capture applications out there and my current favorite happens to be Jing to capture, annotate and share screenshots. One thing it doesn’t do is capture entire web pages including non-visible parts (most web pages have as much content below the fold as it does above nowadays).

My favorite way to capture entire web pages as screenshots are now through a couple of Firefox add-ons, FireShot and Screengrab. Read on for more details on these add-ons.

Fireshot Add-on for FireFox (and Internet Explorer)

This is a comprehensive add-on with a free and a pro version that not only captures screens but allows the user to annotate, and edit the screenshot before making it available for copying to clipboard or saving. It also has an upload to web function that uploads the image to the web and makes the link available for use.

After installing Fireshot, a button is made available beside the search bar on the top toolbars that activates the screen grabbing functionality. This opens up a new window with the editor available and presents the user with the screenshot and options.

Note, the first time you click the Fireshot button on the toolbar, you will get a choice to also add it into Internet Explorer.

Above is a screenshot of a longer then a screen web page with some of the features from the free version of Fireshot shown. It has basic image editing filters that you can make to any selection that includes Greyscale, Blurring, Inverting colors, Outer Glow, Crop and Fill that gives the user a lot of flexibility to really make a screenshot pop.

You can get the free version from here: http://bit.ly/FireshotAddonPage 

Screengrab Add-on for Firefox

A much simpler version that provides simple capture methods without the editing components. This application is also an excellent way to capture entire web pages or parts as screen grabs.

When installed it presents a button at the bottom right of your Firefox window that you can left-click to see its options.

It allows for saving or copying (to the clipboard):

• The entire Webpage or Frame
• The Visible portion only
• A Selection (the window will go pink and you use your mouse to select the area)
• The window itself

A simple application and one that works well. Very popular if you want effectively a single click method to screen capture your sites.

You can get Screengrab from here: http://bit.ly/ScreengrabAddonPage

Related Posts

A while ago, I looked at a screen capture tool that I used for quite some time called Cropper. I’ve recently been introduced to an alternative that has replaced all my screen capture requirements and is now my primary tool for capturing screenshots and screen casts.

Having been around for a few years, TechSmith has improved Jing’s capabilities as a viable screen capture application and has resulted in a user-friendly and robust application.

This is one of the few applications where I do not feel the need to write extensively about the product due to its excellent website. I would advise my readers to go there for more information as it is quite comprehensive in explaining how to use Jing.

The only thing I would suggest here is that Jing by default has a set of buttons so when you have finished capturing a screen, it can “save to disk”, “capture to clipboard” or “upload to screencast.com”. I personally do not like the “upload to screencast.com” button as its too easy to hit and I’m frequently capturing screens that are commercially sensitive…

In order to get around this, Jing offers a means to configure your buttons. When you have captured a screen, you will be taken to an editing window:

Click on the rightmost button (spanner) to configure your buttons and remove the “Upload to screencast.com” button”. This way, the only actions you can do is to either Save it or Copy to Clipboard.

Jing comes in both a free version and a “pro” version. For everyday use, the free version is perfect. It sits unobtrusively on the top of your screen ready to be clicked on whenever you need a new capture.

There seems to be a dedicated and fun bunch of people behind Jing and it shows on their blog which has some excellent tips on getting the best out of their software.

I know there are quite a few screen capture applications out there, but I’ve found Jing to have met my needs perfectly at the moment. They would make the product even better to allow for round frames instead of just rectangular ones but I’m not one to complain when its free and does pretty much everything I want :)

Relevant Links

• Jing Home Page
• Getting Started with Jing Help Site
• Jing Blog (worth a read :) )

Recently I test drove a free screencast application called ScreenToaster (a free application that can record your screen and upload to YouTube!).

You can check it out here: ScreenToaster Article

One of the major gripes I had with the application is the lack of online help support in the form of a Forum. A forum for any product is important as that builds the community and is one of the first places to look in terms of help and support. Additionally, its a place where others can showcase their ideas, tutorials and suggest ways to use the application well beyond what the original developers have intended for the application.

I’m pleased to say that recently we got an email from Rudy that ScreenToaster has now put in a forum on their site!! This is excellent news and while its still new and relatively unpopulated, with the wide range of follower that ScreenToaster has, I see the forum growing significantly over time.

In addition to that, the latest version of ScreenToaster includes:

• Uploading videos to YouTube can now be done in High Definition format. So you don’t have to stick with hosting your videos on ScreenToaster if you want HD.
• Downloading in .mov format is released so that you can now do some offline editing of the screencast using your favourite video editor
• There is now an API available for developers to use to publish your screencasts directly into your websites/blog/forums.
• More tweaks to make the application even easier to use.

So along with the forums, I can see some really positive directions ScreenToaster is taking. I know its not going to be as fully featured as a commercial product such as Camtasia, but its an excellent free alternative which doesn’t require an application to be installed (apart from Java) and can screencast from any desktop with access to the internet.

Related Links:

• ScreenToaster Forums
• ScreenToaster Home Page
• ScreenToaster Press page (where yes! we’re mentioned too!)
• NewbTech Test Drive of ScreenToaster

In the last post we test drove an application called Cropper that takes static screen shots of your desktop (full screen or partial). This time we’ll extend it a bit further and look at ways to record screens to produce screencasts. I’m sure all of you have gone to sites such as youtube and seen lots of "how to" videos that had recordings of someones desktop as they walk you through some operation with a monotone voice in the back dictating what they are doing…

Well in this case, we’ll have a look at an application that allows us to create such videos. Now, I’m NOT going to do the monotone voice thing.. however, I will endeavor to get some form of recording going to show you how its done.

The application is called ScreenToaster and it meets my criteria of being free and functional! ScreenToaster is a web-based screen recorder designed to capture your screencasts, do some minimal post-recording activities (such as adding sub-titles, audio etc) and then either stream them directly from their site or download as a video file.

So lets start shall we?

Step 1 – Open up your favorite web browser and go to http://www.screentoaster.com. Here you will have to do the obligatory "registration" by following the Register link on the top menu. Fairly standard stuff.

Couple of things to note:

When I completed the registration, a pop up appeared that stated that a confirmation email was sent out (good), but there was a "Record" button at the bottom!.. I had to click on the "Close" button on the top right of the dialog box to get off that screen and back into the main page. Not a biggie, but may surprise newbies..

Because we want to create and host a video, we have to register. If all you want to do is to watch videos (made by others of course), then you don’t have to register.

Step 2 – Right.. registration done. Confirm your registration by checking your email and clicking on the verify email.. Again, fairly standard here.

Step 3 – The first thing I tried to do once registered is of course to hit the "Start Recording" button to see if anything fancy comes up. Well something did.. I use Chrome for my home browsing and I immediately got a plug-in install request. ScreenToaster requires the latest version of Java to be installed, so if you don’t have that, then you’ll need to download and install that first before you can do anything else. Which is fair enough, so I went ahead and installed it by following the prompts (in Chrome, you get a fancy little bar on the top that says that a plug-in is required.. then you just follow the steps, or alternatively, go here to download and install for Chrome.

Step 4 – If you had to install Java, you’ll need to restart your browser for the install to complete successfully. I did that and finally hit the Start Recording button.

The first time you run this application, you may get some warnings pop up by the Java engine asking for permission to allow ScreenToaster to run. Click on Run to allow it.

Once the applet has loaded, you’ll see this screen. ScreenToaster is hotkey driven (default being alt-S). You can choose whether to capture the whole desktop or a slice as well as microphone and webcam settings.

Its at this point in time where you’ll need to experiment a little :) If you are capturing part of a screen, a black box will appear that you can resize using the corners or move using the top right corner button. It will take some time to get used to the interface. Also, hitting the record button gives you a 5 second grace to get what you really want to capture in front and ready to go :). Hitting Alt-S while recording will naturally pause the recording.

Step 5 – Once you have finished recording, you can hit the Stop Recording button and the following window will pop up.

Here you can preview your video and add subtitles and voice if you like. Adding subtitles can be done by simply pausing the video where you want your subtitle to be, and hitting the subtitle button and entering your text in.. resume.. pause.. enter text in.. resume.. and so forth. Again, it takes a bit of practice. I didn’t play with the mic option. There is even a handy button to change the "preview" image (ie, the first image that pops up when first going to the video or seeing its thumbnails.

Step 6 – Up until now, that video is local… So in order to "Save" it, you will need to upload the video somewhere. Currently you can upload the video to YouTube or to ScreenToaster themselves. Or alternatively, you can "download" it as a flash or movie file.

If you use ScreenToaster to host your video, it will get saved in High Quality. Means it looks better, but takes longer to load, so be aware of your "audience".

As an experiment, I uploaded a video of my uber FreeCell skillz (not!) to ScreenToaster. The resulting page (Click here :)) showed me a screen very similar to youtube :) It also had embed and url links that i can use to share the video. As i have done below..

Your videos can be marked "private" and you can delete them from ScreenToasters servers.

Conclusions

ScreenToaster is a good application.. however, you really need to get used to the interface. The thing that really got to me was that once i uploaded a video to screentoaster, it gave me no way of going back to my video to then upload it to youtube or download it as a flash file… that meant that i had to do the same video all over again.. They are currently working on a way to edit published videos… but not sure when that would be available.

Other things that struck out was the amount of buffering it had to do when playing the HQ videos in ScreenToaster. It was not the fastest shall we say.. But i’m hoping it will get better in the future. This is dependent on your ADSL speed of course, but I get a lot faster responses in YouTube then ScreenToaster.

Lastly, I had a bit of a problem actually getting the recording going on Chrome, so I tried in IE and it worked, and then worked magically in Chrome too.. *shrug*

ScreenToaster has a good FAQ section that does give some general guides and the application’s interface, once gotten used to, is actually quite simple to use.

It has a blog, twitter and rss support, though i didn’t seem to see any forums. That would have been of immense use to give support to this product. I did see in their Twitter page that they are looking into this too.

All in all, a fairly good set of functionality, a little rough around the edges, but excellent idea and once again, free cannot be sneezed at :)

I believe this application will only get better with time and I look forward to actually using this for future articles :) Excellent potential. Good luck chaps and lets see them forums and post-publish functionalities working!

UPDATE: 19th April, 2009 – Updated news on ScreenToaster and forums etc here: http://www.newbtech.com/2009/04/screentoaster-news-and-updates.html

Related Links:

• http://www.screentoaster.com – Home Page
• http://twitter.com/screentoaster – ScreenToaster Twitter

There are many applications out there that can capture all or part of your screens. The more notable ones include SnagIt and via Microsoft Office One Note. Unfortunately most of these cost to use. Cropper has been around for a while now and is one of the best free screen capture applications out there.

Written by Brian Scott and available for both Windows 32bit and 64bit operating system, it offers an easy, intuitive and configurable means to capture ones desktop.

Lets go through its main features first before we take it for a test drive….

For anyone with NO screen capture utility, the usual method to capture a screen is to:

1. Hit the PrtScn button on your keyboard to store the desktop in your clipboard
2. Open up Paint
3. Paste the captured image into Paint
4. Use the crop tool to select just what you want. Cut it out and go to File..New to open up new window
5. Paste your cropped image into this window
6. Finally save the image.

Now try doing that a dozen times for your report or documents…

Features

• Cropper is built using Microsoft .Net framework
• Its Open Source and FREE!!
• It can capture the active window, a predefined area, the whole screen and more.
• It supports multiple formats to output the image including the clipboard (so you can simply crop a part of a screen and say, paste directly into Word.
• It can capture transparent windows (used by Vista quite a bit).
• It offers Plug-in support to allow a wide variety of plug-ins to be developed and used to supplement the application functionality

To Install

To install and run Cropper, use the following steps:

Step 1

Go to http://cropper.codeplex.com/ to get to the main download page of Cropper. Click on the Download button to download the application. Installing the application is simply unzipping the contents into a temporary folder and starting up the Setup application. Follow the prompts all the way through to complete the install.

Step 2

The application doesn’t auto-start, so you’ll have to start it yourself. If you had selected the defaults, it will be found in your Start..All Programs.. Fusign&Design.. Cropper folder. To make it start automatically with Windows, simply copy the Cropper shortcut (not folder) into your Startup Menu. Starting the application won’t show anything visible (ie, it doesn’t magically open a window). Instead, you’ll now see a wee icon on your taskbar that looks like a crosshair in a square.

Right clicking on the window will bring up a context menu which you can explore to see the various options and choices. As an example, the Output menu drops down to allow you to choose whether to store the image in a file or the clipboard.

Step 3

In order to choose the default folder of where the screenshots will be stored, right click on the Cropper icon and select Options. The first thing I normally do (because I like to store my data in a drive other than my c: drive) is to choose a new location to store all my screenshots. This is in the Output tab of options. I’ve taken a shot of all the tabs (attached below) to give you an idea of the various options that may be available.

 

 

Apart from changing the default folder location, I normally don’t do anything else on these screens. I do however select Jpg as my preferred output by rightclicking on the cropper icon and going to the Output menu and selecting Jpg with quality of 100%.

Step 4

Right, by now you must be asking when we are actually going to capture anything! Well to capture anything is easy! Simply left click on the icon and a magic blue box will appear.

 

This box is the area which will be captured. It displays the size coordinates on the top left plus you get a context menu if you right click anywhere in it. You can also resize the box by dragging on the corners. Once you are happy with your selection, simply doubleclick in the blue window to take a screenshot of the area.

Now, here are some quick rules:

1. To take a screenshot of the entire screen, hit PrtScn on your keyboard and Cropper will take a snapshot of the entire screen and save the screen in your output folder.
2. To take a screenshot of the currently active application, hit Alt + PrtScn on your keyboard.
3. To take a screenshot of the blue area, simply double click anywhere in the blue area.

Thats all there is to it! If you had selected anything other than Clipboard, Cropper would capture the screen area and save it in the output folder.

 

In order to hide the blue box, simply right click in it and select Hide from the context menu.

 

Conclusion

 

In the end, a free product that does a lot of things that most commercially available products do is nothing to sneeze at. Combined with the fact that Cropper has support for Plug-Ins and the source is freely available, its not hard to see why this is a very popular application.

In the end, I have Microsoft Office One Note which supports a similar way of capturing parts of the screen and I would most likely continue using that. But for people who don’t have One Note, this would be a very nice alternative.

Again, as this is a test drive, I’ve only scratched the surface and haven’t gone into Plug-ins etc. The application is quite simple to learn and use and once you’ve gotten used to it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Relevant links

• http://cropper.codeplex.com/ – source download page
• http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/default.aspx – Brian Scotts (the author) blog.
• http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx – Cropper page on Brians blog