Cool Tools and Gadgets: Screen Capture

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs). CamStudio can also add screen captions to your recordings or insert “picture in picture” webcam movies.

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

Jing is free software that adds visuals to your online conversations. Use Jing to grab a screenshot and enhance it with a caption, highlight or arrow. Then share the screenshot. Jing can also capture up to five minutes of video screencasting (with narration).

Screencast-O-Matic is the original free and easy way to make a video recording of your screen (aka screencast) and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install. Free version allows screencasts of up to 15 minutes in length. Screencasts can be saved as Quicktime MP4, Flash SWF, or Windows Media Player AVI files on your computer or uploaded to YouTube or Screencast-o-Matic’s servers.

Snaggy is an image host that lets you paste images from your clipboard directly online. Any kind of image, from raw data to URL paths, can be pasted in one step. Snaggy also has a simple built-in editor you can use before you share your image.

Awesome Screenshot is a Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browser extension for capturing, annotating, and sharing screenshots. Once you've installed Awesome Screenshot you can simply activate it from your browser to capture a page or region on a page, draw boxes, draw lines, blur out information, and add text to your screenshot. You can save your edited screenshot locally or share it via a URL provided by Awesome Screenshot.