TechSmith today released SnagIt 9 – the best screen capture program for Windows. SnagIt 9 is available for download on Windows XP and Vista systems though the Mac version is still in the works.

The screen capture features in SnagIt 9 are more or less the same as in previous versions but they have completely revamped the user interface on the lines of Office 2007 Ribbon.

The image editor included in SnagIt 9 is more powerful than ever before and offers a plethora of tools / images effects to make your screenshot images look more professional. Here’s a list of some favorite features included in SnagIt 9:

1. Office 2007 Ribbon Interface – If you are already using an Office 2007 program like PowerPoint or Word, you would have no trouble getting “fluent” with the new SnagIt 9 interface. Others may take some time to master the new layout but once you are comfortable, you’re going to love it.

2. Crop Screenshot Images Quickly – You can now remove the white space areas around screen captures in a click using the trim command that you may have seen in Photoshop as well. SnagIt 9 will crop everything surrounding the actual image like in the above case of Google logo.

3. Screenshot Manager with Instant Search – With SnagIt 9, you will never have to worry about saving or losing your screen capture images because everything gets saved on your hard drive automatically the moment you hit the print screen key.

What’s more interesting is that SnagIt 9 even remembers the name of the application where that screenshot was taken. For instance, if you search for Firefox, you will see all images that were captured inside the Firefox window. This is awesome.

4. Flags and Keywords – You can tag your screenshots with Flags and / or keywords. May sound a bit confusing but Flags are like categories – you could have one for Website screenshots, one for Bank Transactions, etc. You can further describe these images via keywords like amazon, bank, yahoo, etc.

Since I am an Office 2007 user for a long time, getting used to the new Ribbon interface of SnagIt 9 didn’t take much effort though I wish there was an option to change the color theme like in Office 2007. The new release of SnagIt is highly recommended for power users since it makes it very easy to manage your large collection of screenshot images.

To get a 30 day trial of SnagIt, go to SnagIt.com. Explore the software and let us know here what you like about SnagIt 9. One of you will get a licensed copy of SnagIt 9 for free.

Labels: entertainment