OK, there may have been a lot of thought about it, but unlike the Office team TechSmith didn’t have the usability statistics to see how people actually use the product. While the ribbon looks sexy in SnagIt, it’s pretty clear that not a great deal of thought went into deciding what goes where.

After struggling with it for a bit myself I have to admit that Office is far better for the new ribbon. However Microsoft put a great deal of effort into deciding what controls to put on which section of the ribbon so that commonly used controls lived next to each other and were easy to discover. When Microsoft introduced the ribbon a lot of people complained – people hate change after all. and when you click on one it reveals a bunch of related controls). The first thing to note is that it uses the fancy new Ribbon control that was introduced by Microsoft in Office 2007 (it’s the strip at the top of the dialog labelled Draw, Image, Hotspots, Tags, etc. Since everything is in one place it takes the minimal number of mouse clicks, all the tools such as the arrow tool remember the settings I’d used before (such as the colour, thickness and depth of shadow) so once I’ve used SnagIt one time it’ll remember everything from then on. I frequently capture an image, draw some boxes, arrows and text on it, then add an edge effect – usually that torn paper one – then resize it and save it. The image you’ve captured is in the middle and all effects are on the right such as resizing the image, adding a drop shadow, a torn effect (which is what I’ve used), adding a caption and so on.

The tools you need are on the left, such as boxes, arrows, highlighter, text and so forth. You can then annotate it all you want and save it in the format of your choice. You click a button and it captures either a window or you can draw a box around what you’re interested in. It’s fantastic for putting together documentation or explaining to someone how to use a piece of software. It’s a great tool for taking screenshots of things and adding boxes, arrows and a variety of effects to explain something. I’ve been an avid user of SnagIt for a few years now.

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