Serendipity35

Many of us use screenshots (a still image of what's on our monitor screen) for presentations and in teaching tools, training materials, lesson etc. It's a great way to walk people through a process if you can't provide a full motion screen capture "movie" in Flash or some other program.

The basic way to capture your screen is to use the "Print Screen" key on a Windows machine. You can then paste that full screen into PowerPoint or a Word doc. But editing it to show only a section (you probably don't want all the browser frame, for example) is awkward.

Some people edit within PowerPoint, though many users don't even know they can do that. Some people paste the captured screen to an image editor (anything from Paint to Photoshop) and alter it. There are programs you can buy to do this too. SnagIt is one I have used in the past.

Macintosh users have a "print screen" feature that also allows you to capture just a selected area of the screen - a nice feature. If you are running Windows Vista, you may have discovered "Snipping Tool" hiding in Programs/Accessories that gives you some features beyond simple "Print Screen." (It's been awhile, but people always used to ask me why when they hit "Print screen" nothing ever printed.)

resized smaller version of Kwout screen capture of the PCCC home page

Today's product review is Kwout. It's like a Print Screen key for your web browser. This service lets you capture screenshots of web pages without requiring any other plug-ins or software.

You just type in the web page address and it converts the entire web page to an image. You can then select a portion with your mouse, then click “Cut Out”.

I grabbed the PCCC home page and then checked the options onscreen to add a border, shadow and rounded corner.

I chose for this small image to right-click and save the image to my computer, but I could also have let it stay on the Kwout website.

For that they offer the embed code (something you may be familiar with from YouTube and other sites) to post the image with the image map and link to your web page as I have done below.

to PCCC or view via via kwout with active links & the ability to embed this in your own page

There's also a link that you can drag to your Firefox toolbar or right click "Add to Favorites" in Internet Explorer, so that you can more quickly grab the next screen you want.

There are other things too - post to Flickr or Tumblr, change the background color etc. and if this service catches on, they will probably add more features.

I'm not familiar with HeartRails, (the folks who offer this service which is based in Japan), but it's a cool tool with the right price and easy to use.