You also make a nice and broader point about the software development community. “Beta” used to mean something. No more. It used to mean “we feel our software is almost ready for prime time and general release but we’d like to put it through broader tests outside of our controlled environment first, so we’re releasing it as ‘beta’”. Now, it’s just a way to get an app into the wild faster, let your users be your QA department, and if all is well, shoot, just leave it. ‘beta’ is just a meaningless label at this point. How long was gmail in beta?

Thanks again for the response.

Yes, Skitch is fine, but is missing some basic annotation functionality I like to have, like callouts, blurs, etc. Snagit has both of these. LIttle Snapper is also a decent tool, but again lacks a lot of annotation tools (and the inability to create a straight arrow is absurd). For some reason Mac screen capture apps are obsessed with the online sharing of captures at the neglect of actual annotation tools, which many of us in the eLearning world want and need.

And Skitch has been in beta for what, more than 2 years? Ugh.

Can’t anyone make a truly great screen capture app for Mac? I’ve yet to see it. I had my fingers crossed for Snagit, but as I said, so far I’m not feeling it. Worth $50? Unlikely.

Chris, what do you think Snagit gives you that Skitch does not? I’ve got Skitch for free and it works beautifully, very cool app. Why would I pay $50 for SnagIt?

And jra is right – sometimes all you need is a simple capture, and Grab (or many other apps) do just fine with that. But if you need more (and I often do), I find the current selection of Mac screencapture apps ultimately unsatisfying.

I’m hoping that Snagit for Mac will not only bring better tools, but push the competition as well.

One of the things that people moving from Windows to Mac often take time to realise (and I was one of them), is that software on the Mac tends to follow the Unix tradition of being relatively simple and doing one thing really well, unlike Windows software which tends to be more complex and have a wider range of features. As jra said, in many cases, you do something else with the screenshots once you have them, so do you really need publishing tools in screen grab software?

We’re always learning. And, feedback always helps. Stay tuned for Snagit on Mac… You’ll be one of the first to know!

Betsy Weber | Chief Evangelist | TechSmith
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