A picture is worth a thousand words. I’m sorry to use a cliché but nothing says it better when it comes to documentation. Instead of a page-long list of instructions detailing every click and mouse move just add a picture, overlay an arrow and most people will get the message. This is where Cropper comes into picture
Impressions
First experience was a bit confusing. I installed Cropper, took a screenshot and nothing happened! I eventually clued in that the screenshot was being saved to disc every time I hit Enter or Double-Clicked the screenshot area but it would have been nice to have some sort of notification that the screenshot has been taken.
Once I understood the way it worked it actually made sense. Cropper lets you focus on taking the screenshots as you need them, saves them automatically in he format you need and deal with the screenshots later. This suits the way I work, when I am going through an application I want to just take a screenshot and deal with them later.
A nice array of options is supported. For output formats BMP, JPG and PNG are supported as well as going straight to your clipboard.
This tool is designed with precision in mind. You can preset your capture size, automatically create thumbnails. This is perfect for documentations where having the same screenshot size for similar items is ideal to make the document look neat. Automatically creating thumbnails is a great timesaver too, the author really uses his tool so he knows what kind of pain we go through to create a proper thumbnail for each capture.
The snappy way to create the screenshots made me wish I could also add a voice recording to the screenshot, something like “Nice screenshot of deleting a file”. This would let me clue in to what I was thinking when I took the screenshot. Just kidding but if anybody wants to implement this feature the source code for Cropper is also available.
Price
Free.
Conclusion
This one is a keeper, it will sit forever on my taskbar! 5 stars!
Get Cropper from here: http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx
