One of my current writing projects requires me to produce a LOT of screen captures at the moment and the Windows “Snip” tools isn’t quite cutting it.  I’ve been experimenting with Skitch for Windows, mostly because it directly integrates into Evernote which I use constantly.  Skitch for Mac has been flamed a bunch recently for dropping a bunch of features, most of which seem to be entirely missing from the Windows version. That said I’ve captured over 50 slides in a few hours, so something must be right. Given the project I’m working in is funded from my own back pocket, I’m only going to spring for software which I know works. Skitch has the distinct advantage of (for the moment) being free to use, although it will burn through your Evernote monthly upload allowance very quickly.  However, before I’d awaken the moths in my wallet, the following needs to be sorted:

• For some crazy reason, the scroll wheel doesn’t zoom in an out on the captured image, there are separate Zoom In/Out hot keys (Control + / Control -)
• When saving images, the GUI defaults back to the last folder you saved into, but it forgets the last format you saved in. This means I have to change from PNG (Default) to TIFF (what I need for document authoring) Every. Single. Time. There is no configuration option to set the default change it either.
• Pallet picker for fonts and colours is ridiculously small; you get to choose from 8 colours; I mean seriously; MSPaint has more options.
• It has a useful “blur” function which I need to use a lot, but there are no options it draws your eye to the blurred part of the image, which is completely the opposite of what you actually want.
• I keep running into a bug with colour palette selection. Really annoying. If I can reliably repeat it I’ll try and notify Skitch.

I like that it is easy to capture and save images with very few clicks; despite the niggle with format selection. I put this down to the clarity and simplicity of the interface. I just wish there were a few more options behind it. I’d also like an auto-numbering/capture feature so I could “ScreenSnap”, capture save with a new numbered file name in one manoeuvre.

So, in summary Skitch is a nice little application which does everything I need, for free. Despite my grousing if they addressed my niggles I would happily splurge a (modest) amount of cash on it.

Can anyone else make any recommedation for “cost effective” snagging apps for Windows?