Moazam’s Blog

Most operating system such as Windows and Mac OS X include utilities to capture screenshots. These tools are good enough to capture basic screenshot of your screen. However, most of them do not support the ability to record your screen and save it as video or they do not support the ability to capture objects such as menubar, or toolbar.

There are many reasons why you need a more advance software to capture your screen. Technology bloggers can provide a more detailed screenshot of software they are reviewing, Software Developers can publish video demos of their software, and Web Designer might want to take full screenshot of their work, and many more reasons.

Here are some advance screen capture software you can use on different operating systems:

Windows

SnagIt is a powerful screen capture software for Windows. By using SnagIt you can select and capture anything on your Windows screen and save it as movie or image. SnagIt has several nice features such as the ability to select specific rectangular region of the screen that you want to capture, scrolling window capture, menu capture ability, and text capture.

SnagIt also has a powerful built-in editor that allows you to crop, resize, adjust, add text and apply custom effects to your capture without ever opening another editing applications.

Developed by TechSmith, a single-user license of SnagIt costs $39.95.

Mac OS X

Snapz Pro X allows you to record anything on your screen and save it as a movie or screenshot picture. Snapz Pro X is much more powerful then Mac OS X built-in screenshot tools because it allows you to capture the screen, objects (menus), selections and movies.

Developed by Ambrosia Software, Snapz Pro X 2 costs $29 and $69.

X Window (KDE or GNOME)

KDE users can use the built-in KSnapShot to capture screenshot of the whole desktop, a single window, a selection of window, or a selected region. KSnapShot also support delay capture, which enables you to open a drop down menu and take picture of it.

To capture a screenshot on GNOME, you can use gnome-screenshot program included with GNOME. To access gnome-screenshot, you can either access it via command line which support different options such as delay and border effect. The fastest way to take screenshot of the whole screen is to access the “Take Screenshot” menu from the Applications - Accessories menubar.

Alternatively, linux users can capture some or all of an X Server screen and save the image using import program included with ImageMagick or use xwd.

Xvidcap is a tool to record your screen under X Window System.