No more messing around with Alt+PrintScreen, use the freeware MWSnap to improve your screen captures.

MWSnap from Mirek Wojtowicz is a free screen capture tool which should have more than enough features to act as an alternative to commercial screen capture tools like SnagIT.

What is screen capture all about?

I have used a lot of screen capture tools in the past when working as a Software Tester to help me document raised defects. Screenshots are also essential when writing technical
documentation, help files, and reviews like this.

Without a screen capture tool, the average user will press ctrl+printScreen and then paste (ctrl+v) the resulting screen capture into whatever program requires the screenshot. This usually results in a huge bitmap being created and the actual important details of the
capture being swamped by superfluous information.

A more experienced user will probably paste the capture into an art package and crop the file down and then save or paste it where required.

I recommend the use of a screen capture tool to avoid all the intermediate steps listed above. with a simple Ctrl+shift+A I can capture just the area of the screen I am interested in and I can do it quickly.

I usually have MWSnap setup to send all captured images to the clipboard, and then have a clipboard manager like clipx standing back to collect them.

Installation

For our purposes, of creating a portable install of MWSnap, we download the zip archive from the MWSnap website.

After running MWSnap.exe the MWSnap icon is displayed in the toolbar.

A right click on the MWSnap icon shows a popup menu:

You get a handy list of the keyboard shortcut keys for taking snapshots. I typically use the Shift+Ctrl+A most of the time.

MWSnap also has a few extra features which I haven't really used.

• The colour picker to find out the details of any colour displayed on screen.
• A zoom tool which highlights the area under the cursor for detail work.
• The Ruler tool for identifying the pixel positions on screen
• The window info tool gives the class name and position of the windows on screen.

I can see the above tools being useful for developers, and for testers in extreme situations, but are unlikely to be used very often. But as the app is pretty small I don't think they add too much to the overall installed size of the codebase.

One you have taken a capture.

The picture will be displayed inside the MWSnap window (which you see when you chose the "Restore" option from the popup menu).

The picture can then be amended slightly by flipping it, or rotating it 90 degrees. And you can add a selection of cursors into the picture which I have found useful for adding the mouse pointer where I wanted it, but it would be useful if there was an option to capture the actual mouse pointer with the screencapture.

Other useful features are that MWSnap can be setup to automatically capture an area of the screen every few seconds and save it off to a file, or output it to a printer.

The one drawback for me is that MWSnap lacks the ability to edit the captured images and add annotations, or rescale them to shrink them. But, I have other tools to do that if need be.

For basic screen capture needs, this is a very useful tool to have in your armoury and I'm glad it is on my portable drive.