Ambrosia Software Snapz Pro

Posted By admin On 15.09.21

Developer: Ambrosia Software

Snapz Pro X 2.2.2 Snapz Pro X is a quantum leap in video capture technology, adroitly capturing full motion video of anything on your screen at a blistering pace, complete with digital audio, and an optional microphone voiceover. Think of it as a digital video camera for your screen. Ambrosia Software. November 15, 2012. It gives us great pleasure to inform everyone that the update to our award winning software, Snapz Pro X 2.5 has been released!!! Snapz Pro X 2.5.0 has been rewritten from the ground up with the most modern APIs to take maximum advantage of Mac OS X 10.7.4 or later.

Price: $29 (basic version); $69 (with movie capture engine)

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9

Universal: Yes

Trial: Fully-featured (watermarking after 15 days or 100 screen captures)

Ambrosia Software Snapz Pro X

Command-Shift-3. A special key combination that all Mac users sooner orlater learn. Press them together and you have a picture of the currentscreen placed on the Desktop. You have made yourself a screenshot.Should there be more to it? According to the developers of Snapz Pro X,yes, taking screenshots should be more than just making a static image.

Installation of Snapz Pro X (Snapz for short) is done with an AppleInstaller package. While it is not as simple as dragging an icon from adisk image into the Applications folder, it is still a simple process togo through. You must register Snapz in order to use it properly.Unregistered, after 15 days or 100 captures, Snapz will place watermarkson all the images and movies made. A registration program is included inthe Snapz folder.

Unlike programs that do not take into account the fact that one machinecan have multiple accounts on it, the Snapz registration programprovides, via a check box, the option to register for all users on thesame machine. As someone who lately bought software that requiresregistration and found out that the program would work only for theaccount running the registration program, I welcome this thoughtfuloption. I share my Mac with my wife and my son, with me havingadministration rights. To allow my whole family to enjoy the Mac usingtheir own accounts, with some games, I can get away with re-enteringregistration code; with others I have to go the extra mile and adjustfolder permissions; and then there are some programs that would not workat all, even after I entered the registration code. I really wish alldevelopers followed the example of Snapz Pro X.

During installation, Snapz is added as a login item, but only for theaccount that ran the installer. To add it to other accounts’ startup, avisit to the Account Preferences suffices. Snapz can also be launchedmanually, although this is not recommended, perhaps to maintain thenon-intrusive nature of Command-Shift-3.

By default, Snapz’s hotkey is Command-Shift-3. When invoked, Snapzappears and presents four ways to capture: entire screen, objects (suchas menus and dialog boxes), selection, and movie.

At this point, the more observant reader may wonder, “If the $69 versionincludes the movie capture engine, then what does the $29 version giveme beyond what Command-Shift-3, Command-Shift-4, andCommand-Shift-4-Space provide for free?” It’s a natural question, butthere are compelling reasons to part with your money. First of all,Snapz lets you specify where to store the screenshots. You also have asay in the file format used. I like to keep my Desktop uncluttered andalso want to use as little hard disk as possible, such that I preferlossy formats like JPEG, so these two features got me sold.

Ambrosia Software Snapz Pro

Snapz offers many other improvements to the screen capture process. Thenames of the screenshots can be preceded with the name of theapplication. FirefoxScreenSnapz001 sure is more meaningful than justPicture 2. When capturing a selection, the selection can be adjusteduntil it is exactly what you want. You make the selection using arectangular crop box much complete with control points. To move thecrop box, just click inside the box and move it to the new place.In Object capture mode, you have the choice of hiding or showing themouse pointer. The captured object can also have a border applied to it.Choices of border include hairline, rounded window, drop shadow, andfade to white. Last but not least, as long as your Dock is not set toauto-hide, Snapz can easily capture it in Object mode—something I cannotdo with Command-Shift-3 or Grab.

The average Mac user may not care much about all the improvements Snapzoffers over the built-in screen capture tool, but for those who oftenwrite documentation, Snapz is an indispensable tool. In addition to thevarious options to capture and manage static images, Snapz’s moviecapture ability is very useful for online tutorials. Instead of tellingyour reader to click this and that, a QuickTime movie showing the actionto be taken is the best way to teach. After invoking Snapz, you need todefine a rectangular region on the screen within which all movementswill be captured. When you think you have recorded enough material forthe movie, press the hotkey to bring up Snapz’s movie save window.

Ambrosia Software For Mac Snapz Pro

Movie ready to be saved.

Only if you decide to save the movie clip would you see a preview of it.The movie may take a long time to save, so I think the preview should bethere as soon as the movie save window appears. What’s more, while themovie is being recorded, there should be some indication that it ishappening. Wiretap Pro, another product distributed by AmbrosiaSoftware, has the feature. Without the visual cue, it is easy to forgetthat you are recording, and you can end up trying to save a very largemovie later on.

One issue I have with Snapz is the way it handles overlapping windowswhen capturing Objects. Let’s say I have two windows, one for myinternal hard drive (PowerBook G4) and one for the LaCie external drive.

If I snap the PowerBook G4 window with Command-Shift-4 followed by thespace bar, the resulting picture would correctly have just the PowerBookG4 window. With Snapz’s Object capture, the back window would beproperly detected and marqueed, but when actually captured the resultingimage would include the foreground window.

In my mind, software that tries to replace the no-frills utilitiesthat come with the OS should do what the default commands do in the sameway, but also offer improvements over them. Not automatically bringingthe background window to the front is a shortcoming. Still, I can workaround the issue by manually bringing any windows in the backgroundforward before invoking Snapz.

A more serious issue involves taking screenshots while the applicationis in full-screen mode. Recall that with Snapz you are supposed toinvoke the Snapz window with the hotkey, then choose among the fouroptions. However, when a game is in full-screen mode, i.e. you only seethe game screen and nothing else, no Dock, no Desktop, the Snapz windowwon’t appear atop the game screen.

The four Snapz buttons are assigned hotkeys, too, i.e. 1 is for screen,2 for object, 3 for selection, and 4 for movie, so I thought I couldforce a screen capture by press 1 then blindly click anywhere in thescreen. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. If Snapz is invokedwhile an application is in full-screen mode, although it doesn’t come tothe foreground, the Snapz window will be there when the application isclosed, with whatever screen the application was at when Snapz wasinvoked. You can then capture the screen the usual way.

Ambrosia Software Snapz Pro

This means that if you want to make screenshots of, say, the firstscreens of the first five levels of a platform game, you would have tostart and quit the game five times. It is tedious, but I can live withit, really. But no, that is not all there is. To really have the screencaptured and saved to a file in the designated folder, you must selectthe Choose File Name option in the Snapz menu. With the option selected,each time you finalize a capture, you will have the choice to specifythe name. With the option not chosen, click all you want, and no newimage will appear in the designated folder.

I had the idea that perhaps if I freed up Command-Shift-3, by assigningthe Snapz hotkey to some other key combination, then I could still useCommand-Shift-3 to capture full-screens. Alas, my idea didn’t fly. OnceSnapz is running, there is no way to use Command-Shift-3 the old wayanymore. The simplest thing to do would be to remove Snapz as a loginitem and add it back as the need arises. Another option is to useActivity Monitor to quit the Snapz process.

Overall, Snapz Pro X 2.1.1 is a good addition to any document writers’toolbox. Casual Mac users may make do with the OS’ built-in screencapture method, but Snapz offers so many more enhancements for theprofessional writer. The movie recording option is definitely worthwhileto have, even if there is no visual guide to the recording’s progress.However, for all the bells and whistles Snapz Pro X adds on top of thesimple Command-Shift-3, it fails to provide an easy way to capture infull-screen mode. Unless you really need the movie-making capability,love the other enhancements, and rarely need to capture game screens infull-screen mode, Snapz Pro X is not for you.