SnagIt

SnagIt is a screen capture tool with many additional features making it a very useful program for editing images, capturing demo videos of your on-screen activity, organizing stored images more efficiently and great for sharing your images and videos via social networking sites.

Developed by TechSmith the first release came in 1990 and it was a simple screen capture and print utility originally developed for TechSmiths developers for showing screen shots of Microsoft Windows applications to their clients until being publically released. SnagIt 2.x released in 1992 is when popularity really grew for this product; it was distributed as shareware and received five stars in PC Computing magazine. V3.1 saw support added for capturing scrolling windows and not just part of screen, so it could capture a whole website for example. V4.3.3 saw support added for video capture support, this feature was slightly buggy sometimes, for example when pausing and resuming a video, audio would be lost, this was fixed in v5.1.1.

In version 11 there is support for improved text capture and this allows you to take a screen shot of text on a website and SnagIt will detect this and allow you to open the file in Microsoft word or notepad for editing. There are improved add-ons for image editing like adding a stamp or annotations to your captured images, which can be downloaded from TechSmiths website. Video capture was greatly improved to work better with the audio and supported integration with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter so you can upload all your media files and share with your friends.

Snagit v8.0 is the last version to support Windows 95/NT 4.0. Snagit v8.1.0 is the last version to support Windows 98/Me. Snagit v9.0 is the last version to support Windows 2000. All versions of SnagIt are compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7. Users have relied on version 9.0 as the most stable release of SnagIt; later versions are improved in terms of features but some find them too bloated.

Pros: Captures videos of on screen, quick screenshots, editing features, sharing support, cool UI.

Cons: Video files can only be saved in .avi format, trialware.