Free Screenshot Captor Trounces $50 Snagit

Taking screenshots is an addictive habit: It's something many people don't do, but once you get started, you will probably find yourself taking them all the time. Screenshots are great for illustrating software bugs, showing a relative or friend how to do something on the computer, documenting your astounding gaming feats and records, and dozens of other daily uses. Screenshot Captor (free) lets you take many kinds of screenshots, and in some ways it performs even better than the screenshot industry's 800-pound gorilla, Snagit ($50).

One of the trickiest tasks for a screenshot application is to take a screenshot of a scrolling window. Let's say you're trying to save an image of a webpage that takes up several screen lengths: Your screenshot application would have to be smart enough to scroll the window, take multiple screenshots, and then stitch them together into one seamless image, eliminating duplicate content.

Screenshot Captor offers an advanced (if tricky) interface for capturing scrolling windows.In Screenshot Captor 3.0, scrolling capture was reworked from the ground up, and I couldn't resist pitting it head-to-head against Snagit. In terms of UI, Snagit is far slicker: Just hover over a scrolling area and a double-arrow icon shows up. Click the icon, Snagit scrolls the area, takes a screenshot, and you're done. Screenshot Captor uses a much more involved interface in which you test the window for scrolling methods beforehand, take the screenshot, and then stitch the image back together once the screenshot was taken, with full control over the stitching process.

I first tried to take a screenshot of a webpage shown in Opera. Snagit flat-out refused to work: The double-arrow icon simply didn't show up. Screenshot Captor reported that Opera wouldn't respond to normal scrolling actions, so I just told it to send PgUp/PgDn keypresses. That worked fine, and produced a beautiful screenshot. Screenshot Captor 1, Snagit 0.

My next test was capturing a screenshot of art website Ffffound.com shown in Chrome. I picked Ffffound because it's a long webpage, and because it often contains animated GIFs. Snagit scrolled the page briskly and produced a screenshot. Sadly, it was confused by an animated GIF, producing multiple copies of it one after the other, effectively breaking the screenshot. Worse yet, Snagit doesn't offer easy tools for fixing such errors.

Screenshot Captor scrolled much faster than Snagit, and it caught the animated GIF mid-frame: There was no duplication. There were some image issues near the bottom of the page, most of which I easily fixed using Screenshot Captor's post-processing stage. The end result was a beautiful screenshot of a page containing an animated GIF. Screenshot Captor 2, Snagit 0.

Scrolling image capture is just one of Screenshot Captor's features. Screenshot Captor can also save an individual screenshot of every control (button, text area, and so on) in the target window automatically, or just take a simple screenshot of the active window or any region of the screen. The application also features a built-in image editor with simple annotation tools such as arrows and text boxes, and supports free utility ZUploader (from the makers of ZScreen) for uploading images to hosting services.

In terms of UI, you won't find many bells and whistles. Screenshot Captor is a no-nonsense utility, containing plenty of options, buttons, and controls and very little visual flair. The buttons are clearly labels, and helpful hints explain tricky points. The author, Mouser, also created a series of screencasts showing how to use some of the tools.

If you don't mind the initial learning curve, you'll find Screenshot Captor 3 to be a very capable screenshot application that makes things as simple while still providing enough tools to obtain professional-looking results.

--Erez Zukerman

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Web Link Captor Turns Your Search Results Into a List of Links for Pasting

I sometimes look at software like a cook looks at kitchenware. If Google Chrome and MS Word are like my favorite non-stick pan and cutting board that I use every day, Web Link Captor (free/donationware) would be a cherry pitter, something I would need maybe once every few months for a very specific task--but does its job like no other tool can.

Web Link Captor runs multiple Web searches for a list of item, and returns a list of formatted results for use in forums, Wikipedia, etc.You feed Web Link Captor with a list of terms, such as names of books or music albums. It then searches the Web for those terms and compiles a well-formatted list of results for each item. You can then paste this list into a forum post, a Wiki page, or any HTML document. Think about it: How long would it take you to manually create a list with links to the Amazon, Wikipedia, and official homepages of ten different authors (thirty links in all)? This could easily take fifteen-twenty minutes, even if you're fast. With Web Link Captor, you can do this in seconds (after you configure it for the job).

Web Link Captor is different from utilities such as wget and curl, which simply download the page or website you point them at (curl actually does a great deal more, but it's not focused on search). But much like wget and curl, Web Link Captor was clearly written for nerds with a strong technical background.

The developer, Donationcoder.com's Mouser, took a complex process and broke it into nine clearly-defined steps, displayed as a list along the left side of the window. The first step is entering your text. This can be a straight list of names, but you can also get fancy and include additional information on each line, like a note saying "my favorite album," etc. Be sure to maintain a uniform format, because you will have to help Web Link Captor parse your list in the next few steps.

The next step is called Manipulate Input, and here Web Link Captor's technical innards start to show. The application is built as a collection of 74 Python scripts (I counted), and each step makes a few of these available for you to use and configure. This is a very technical process--the scripts have names like "Core.Modify.Process - Change Case," and each script accepts different input options (all briefly explained).

Next, you get to review the parsed input lines, to make sure Web Link Captor now understands your list. Now you can to configure search: You can use Google, Bing, Wikipedia via Bing, or Amazon via Bing (great for creating lists of affiliate links). Web Link Captor ranks search results to decide which results to include in the final set for each search term, and you can tweak that ranking algorithm. For example, you can decide that all Amazon results should appear first in your list, regardless of where they appeared in the search results.

You can also post process the results, to add your own affiliate tag to each Amazon link, for example. Once you configure any post processing, you can review the result grid, showing what hits Web Link Captor found for each term, and how those hits were scored. You can manually eliminate hits from your final list, and there's an easy way to use wildcards (i.e, never show me anything from The Pirate Bay).

Now that you have your results, it's time to configure the output. Out of the box, Web Link Captor speaks fluent BBCode (used for forums), Markdown (used for Wikis), and HTML (used everywhere else). If you need a different format and happen to be a coder, you can always extend Web Link Captor. In fact, you can write your own scripts to extend and customize any other part of the application, too.

Once you've gone through the entire process, you finally get to meet your results list, all ready to copy and paste. Web Link Captor lets you save your project, so you won't have to configure it again in the future if you want to run the same procedure using different terms. You can also share the project with other users, so they can just open the project, enter a list of terms, and click Run to get the results they're after. So, you don't necessarily need to be a computer whiz to use Web Link Captor, but you should know your business if you want to configure or extend it.

All in all, Web Link Captor is a truly unique product. I don't know that I would use it every day (or every month, for that matter), but I am glad to know it's out there, and available for free (donations welcome).

--Erez Zukerman

Web Link Captor takes a list of plaintext items, and builds an output document containing a list of url-linked results based on web searches for the items. It's a way to quickly build a clickable list of items from just their names, suitable for posting on your blog or a forum, etc.

Features

Friendly GUI lets you build flexible sets of processing steps to parse plaintext input lists and perform search and output functions.
You can save and load projects and script configurations for easy re-use.
Uses a set of standalone utility scripts that can be run without the windows front end GUI, and can be easily modified and expanded.
The included backend scripts are in Python (but other languages can be used).
Uses caching to avoid repeating web searches unnecessarily.
Comes with output formatters for HTML, BBCode, Markdown/Wikipedia.
Comes with searching engines for google, and bing/opensearch (which can handle amazon, wikipedia, and many others).
Flexible scoring system lets you interactively or programmatically tweak your results to get the best list of links.

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