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Loading Zone February 2006 • Vol.6 Issue 2 Page(s) 72 in print issue
The Bleeding Edge Of Software Inside The World Of Betas

eSnips 1.1.0.1 Beta

Official product name: eSnips
Version # previewed: 1.1.0.1 Beta
Publisher: Net Snippets
Developer and URL: Net Snippets; www.esnips.com
ETA: Q1 2006
Why you should care: A great mix of free public and private Internet storage.

There’s no shortage of Internet services that give you online space to post information and share photos, but eSnips, which gives you 1GB of space, is among the easiest to use, offers optional plug-ins for many browsers, and is free.

First, you sign up for a free eSnips account. Then you download and install an IE toolbar or Firefox/Netscape extension, which makes adding to your online space much simpler and convenient. With the plug-ins you can easily grab URLs, a screen shot (either square or irregularly shaped), or text and slap it directly into your eSnips’ folder hierarchy. You can also use the toolbar to upload files (in bulk) or whole folders of photos.

You can access this content wherever you go, and eSnips has tons of features to make sharing content with others easy. You can set folders as private or public and send email invitations to others to view your public folders. Visitors can view photos, download slideshows, leave comments, add their own files, and even invite others to view content. As the account’s owner, you have access to various statistics, including who’s seen what, who’s added new material, or who else has been invited.

If there’s a problem with eSnips, it is perhaps that it’s too flexible. It’s a standard public photos site in that there are invitations and user-tracking, but it isn’t a go-anywhere Desktop because dealing with many documents without the browser plug-in is too cumbersome. Still, it may be just the tool for sharing digital media with the right group of people, and at a price that’s hard to argue with.

Screenshot Captor 2.05.02 Beta

Official product name: Screenshot Captor
Version # previewed: 2.05.02 Beta
Publisher: DonationCoder.com
Developer and URL: DonationCoder.com; www.donationcoder.com
ETA: Q1 2006
Why you should care: You won’t find a more full-featured screen capture program for less.

Taking screen shots is something everyone does once in awhile, and the basic tools to do it have been built into Windows for years. Essentially, you copy the screen to the Clipboard via the PrintScreen key, Paste it into Paint, and save the file. There are many professional tools that streamline this process, but their cost seems hard to justify for taking the occasional screen grab. Fortunately, there is Screenshot Captor, which is full of features and is free. Sort of.

SC eschews the common GPL license of open-source software, and you must register SC to get an unlock code. Registration is free, however, as is the unlock code. If you like the software or the site it comes from, you’re encouraged to make a donation, which can be as large or small as you like, and you can donate more as you use more software packages. In addition to warm fuzzies, donations garner small perks at the site and guaranteed free access to future software, should it become commercial. Neat idea.

After you use SC a while, you’ll probably want to make a donation; it’s that good. The app takes screen shots, window and active-area shots, and so forth in a rapid-fire manner with keyboard shortcuts. Once captured you can easily add captions, arrows, crop, magnify, blur, sharpen, and edit to your heart’s desire. Saving files in different formats is no problem, and the program can even name them in a numeric sequence automatically.

The interface takes some getting used to, but a thorough Help file provides all answers. And for the app’s price, you can hardly quibble with having to review a few instructions.

by Warren Ernst