Snapz Pro alternatives and experience with TechSmith

[laurendc]

Greetings all,

Currently in the process of justifying a switch to SnagIt from Snapz Pro to the boss. With offices in different time zones and no technicians, manually activating anything is a pain in the rear to do and to maintain. And it's 2014, people...

Before we move forward, can admins here confirm if the vendor is nice to work with from a deployment perspective? The website appears to be enterprise friendly with volume licensing and key info readily available. I just want to move away from the headache that our Snapz Pro installations have provided us.

And if you use something besides SnagIt for screen captures, please share.

[gregneagle]

"And if you use something besides SnagIt for screen captures, please share."

Command-Shift-4
Command-Shift-3
Preview.app
Grab.app

...all included with the OS.

-Greg

[chris_kemp]

I use the built-in tools myself, including Quicktime X for screen recording, although we do deploy Snapz to a few machines that need the additional functionality.

[mm2270]

Yeah, at one point in time, long ago, I used 3rd party products for this stuff, but I now just use all the built in tools, including QuickTime X, which provides the screen recording portion. It depends on your actual needs of course, so if you need some very specific functions for this, it might make sense, since the built in tools are sparse by design. Otherwise, I'd actually consider moving away from those 3rd party products altogether.

[donmontalvo]

One of my colleagues swears by this tool...

man screencapture

[laurendc]

Sounds like some things have changed since this thread: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=6042

@mm2270][/url][/url at the moment, we've got folks using it for the screen recording and various formatting and file output options. Plus the video editors swear by the quality of the file formats with Snapz.

At the moment, we are using SnagIt for the Windows machines and are considering giving the Mac client a try. Also considering Camtasia...

@donmontalvo][/url][/url I didn't know about this tool - I'm going to have to play around with it for my own use.

[donmontalvo]

I've been a SnapzPro user since Mac OS days, but Ambrosia hasn't done anything with that app, and now they've outsourced development so it's cr@p.

I bought SnagIt and I use it occasionally, but it's bloated and not very convenient...I just want to take a window+cursor grab, or a dragselect+cursor grab, and I want to tell it what folder to put the images in (individidual images, not in some stupid database format).

I don't need shadows. I don't need borders. I don't need watermarks. I don't need bells and whistles. I just want it to do what SnapzPro *used* to do...and in the words of Johnny T, I want it to get out of the way. ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LmPBPWHJu4

[jaharmi]

This is built-in and as long as you have access to a shell (even remotely, but not limited environments like Recovery HD), you can run it. Can’t beat the licensing costs for that.

sleep 4 ; screencapture -tpng -iwW ~/Pictures/Screencapture-`date +%Y%m%d`-`openssl rand -base64 6`.png

It gives you a delay of 4 seconds to set up your screen shot, and then you get the standard interface for selecting a window as the subject of the screen shot. If you cancel the screenshot, no file is saved. The output filename includes the date and a random string so you shouldn’t get conflicts (but the openssl command will occasionally generate strings that are bad for filenames). Drop shadows are retained because OS X screenshots look extremely weird to me if they have no depth. (I’d rather have a smaller shadow but the Python script I used for that relied on the deprecated Core Graphics bindings.)

I also prefer posting/publishing reduced screen shots so that elements in them aren’t mistaken for the real thing. For that, I create a Folder Action with an attached Automator workflow that reduces a copy of the file to 80% of its original size. Probably an anachronism in this age of retina graphics. If you have to repurpose your images in other ways, you can have more than one Folder Action folder, one for each process.

Anyway, this is roughly how I replaced Snapz Pro many years ago, and I mentioned it to Andrew when I had lunch with him once. (Ambrosia used to be across town from me.)

This is not a full-blown replacement for other things a screen shot (or movie) tool can do, but it quickly takes quality screenshots that can be edited through other means. It is also available on virtually any Mac where you might like to take a screenshot.

[jarednichols]

If you're doing still captures, Cmd-Shift-3 and Cmd-Shift-4 are sufficient. There's also the less well known Cmd-Shift-4 and then tap the space bar. What does that do? Allows you to capture the current window. I'll demonstrate.

Here's a Cmd-shift-4 of a Finder window of my home folder. I hit it the key combo and then dragged a box around it.

It looks purely "meh" as you've got bits of the background. Sure, you could crop it down farther, but then you're worried about the rounded corners still having bits of the background. I'm a stickler for detail and always want really great looking screen shots.

Here is Cmd-Shift-4 and then the space bar of the same window. When you do so, it'll turn the cursor into a camera instead of the crosshairs you'd expect from Cmd-Shift-4. Simply click on the window you want to capture. Notice it preserves the drop shadow without the background image and makes the screenshot look much much better.

This method also works well to capture menus.

For screen recording (entire screen or a portion) QuickTime X works well, though tools like ScreenFlow are great at making your video screencasts look really really professional with features like being able to zoom up windows for greater detail and blank out unimportant areas of your screen to draw attention to important things you're trying to convey.

[ctangora]

If you are looking for just screen shots (stills) I would suggest looking at Screen Steps or Clarify-It at http://www.bluemangolearning.com. For screen shots and documentation it is great. Doesn't do videos though.

[stevehahn]

Before we move forward, can admins here confirm if the vendor is nice to work with from a deployment perspective?

Edit: I think you may have been asking about whether Techsmith is nice to work with, for SnagIt. I've had decent experiences with TechSmith, my below comments are about Ambrosia Software, makers of Snapz Pro X.

Absolutely not. Their licensing is a nightmare to manage. Every time a new user account signs in and opens Snapz, the license code has to be re-entered.

On previous versions, the license file that was generated when you entered your code was unique to each Mac--it was stored at /Library/Preferences/Snapz Pro License, or something like that. I have 15 Macs that are used for video screen capture and are regularly reimaged because they are used a week or so at a time by different contractors. I had to use Composer to package each of the 15 unique license files so that they could be deployed to the respective Mac at imaging time. A bit of a headache to set up, but it worked OK after that.

When version 2.5 shipped, the licensing scheme was changed. Snapz now keeps a unique license file in each user account. This is impossible to keep up with for deployment purposes. I called out Ambrosia Software about it on Twitter, and whoever manages their Twitter account was very sorry, but nothing actually came of it.

I switched to Screenflick (http://www.araelium.com/screenflick) and never looked back--although Screenflick is a video screen cap solution and it sounds like you're looking for something to handle still screen shots, so that may not be helpful to you.

[donmontalvo]

Yea, Ambrosia Software is a has-been company...

https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=97762&trk=rr_connectedness

[laurendc]

@jarednichols I actually didn't know about the space bar with cmd+shift+4! Life changing.
@stevehahn thanks - I realized later that my post may not have been very clear. Was wondering about TechSmith, for SnagIt. I've not been happy with Ambrosia for the reasons listed here...

[donmontalvo]

Between @jarednichols and @jaharmi's solutions, some real eye openers. :D

[rtrouton]

I've been using Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 for a while, and they've been very useful to me when documenting. One thing I like to do for screenshots is turn off the drop shadow effect that normally accompanies the screenshots created using this method. To disable this effect, you would run the following commands:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

then run:

killall SystemUIServer

Source: http://www.macgasm.net/2011/05/23/disable-dropshadow-mac-os-window-screenshots/

For making screencapture videos, I use a handy app available on the MAS called Screeny:

http://screenyapp.com

For editing the movies produced by Screeny, I normally use Quicktime Pro.

[chris_kemp]

As for the video quality, Quicktime captures in MPEG-4. Nothing wrong with it at all, if you don't export it in some other format. Just export it as a "movie" (that's what the default choice is).

[tkimpton]

I hear your pain and I've been down that route of trying to reason with them :(

Techsmith are ok but their software if difficult to use in the sense that you have to know exactly what your doing to make things work and takes ages to do it properly. I always give them feedback and let them know this.

[#18]

Don't forget, if you add Control into cmd-shit-3 or -4, it only copies to your clipboard and doesn't create a new file. I can't live without it.

[jaharmi]

The keyboard shortcuts and the “screencapture” tool are both ways to start the screen shot process. I happen to do this from the Terminal mostly from long habit, because I’m in the shell frequently anyway, and some of the options were available/accessible there first.

The “-i” flag in the “screencapture” command is documented (with more info about keyboard shortcuts) in its man page (which I suggest reading even if you never use the shell):

Capture screen interactively, by selection or window. The control key will cause the screen shot to go to the clipboard. The space key will toggle between mouse selection and window selection modes. The escape key will cancel the interactive screenshot.

If you don’t like drop shadows on your OS X windows, a) I’m not really sure I understand you (except @rtrouton) and b) you can use the “-o" flag. Really, I wish I had my old Python drop shadow script working, because the shadows were of the more subtle style from older OS X releases.

There are other various flags that do interesting things, like delay the screen capture (although I still prefer my “sleep 4” method to the way “screencapture” does it because it lets me set up things the way I want), send to Preview, send to Mail, and so on.

I generally use a more descriptive output name than I posted, because it helps me organize screen shots from various various of OS X and apps. One of the less apparent advantages of specifying a screen shot from the command line is that you get to set that name up-front, and can create a descriptive name from system information.

[donmontalvo]

Take a screenshot on your Mac
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5775

I'm going to explore all these options, including Jeremy's Terminal method, and these other 3rd party solutions. I'm not a fan of databases for image storage, but I do like being able to have a bunch of screenshots in one bucket, a bucket for each document. Hopefully one of these solutions is designed with enterprise in mind.

[bentoms]

You can always use the inbuilt & change the created images location: http://macmule.com/2013/07/13/change-screenshot-location-from-self-service-with-gui-prompt/

[mm2270]

Since this seems to have evolved into a discussion on taking screenshots using the OSes built in commands, one thing I find many people don't know about is the trick to reposition a screen shot drag.

For example, say you decide to only capture a portion of the screen with Command - Shift -4, and not use the spacebar tap method outlined above by @jarednichols][/url to capture a window. If, once you begin a drag, you see that you started off in the wrong position, don't cancel your drag. Just hold down the Space bar and move the entire selection anywhere on screen. then release the spacebar and continue your drag selection.
Another trick is, begin a drag, then hold down Option and you can resize the selection from the center, rather than from one corner.

I use these two tricks a lot when taking screen captures using the OS commands.

[Kaltsas]

I used to use Snapz but since Ambrosia has been all but shut down for the past couple of years I recently started using Snagit. Snagit seems a little bulkier than Snapz was but I have come to find the built in image modifications useful. I mean it doesn't use much memory but it often feels slugish. Even on my i7. I occasionally have to make support videos for staff so just using built in features is a nonstarter.

I used screenflow at a previous job, For sure it's the better video product but I got Snagit in a bundle and I do more screenshots then screencasts.

I couldn't attest to deploying them, I only use the stuff internally for documentation and training.

P.S. this thread made me sad. Ambrosia was a key part of my indoctrination into the Apple world during my formative years.

[mm2270]

@Kaltsas - yeah, I think anyone that's been around for a few years with the Mac, especially anyone that goes back to the OS 8/9 days, has had at least one piece of Ambrosia software on their Mac at one time.
Just goes to show though that all companies can come and go, unless they endeavor to stay relevant. They didn't endeavor to, and here we are.