apk zippy

Introduction
If you play a video on a Windows PC you can't take a screen shot. Press Print Screen won't give you anything. If you use Greenshot or other screen shot utilities, again you'll get nothing, just a black screen! Then I came across the solution. I'm using VLC Media Player and I noticed it actually has a built-in screen shot function!


Instructions
In VLC Media Player, play your film, press pause at the screen you want to capture.



Click Video and change the 'Video snapshots' Directory (click Browse to select a folder)

Click Save

For this change to take effect you must close VLC Media Player and re-open it.

Introduction
I used Greenshot to capture a screen shot then I inserted it directly into an Excel workbook - everything looks fine. I saved the workbook as xlsx and e-mailed it to a colleague. The colleague opened it only to find the following:
The linked image cannot be displayed. The file may have been moved, renamed or damaged.

Introduction
Do you need to record a video of using a software application? Maybe for a presentation, maybe for eLearning, maybe for support to explain how to do something? There are a number of commercial programs that can do this, such as Adobe Captivate. Of course the real problem with those is that they cost money! What about something free that's just as good?

Wink
It is free and easy to use. You can record your screen activity, the mouse pointer is recorded and once you finish, all the activity appears in Wink as separate frames of the video. It's a series of screen shots which makes it easy to edit. You can also annotate your video with text bubbles and add audio commentary. The resulting file you create can be either Flash SWF or EXE. The EXE file is great because it's standalone, you can send it by e-mail.

Download
Learn more and download Wink from here:
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

Conclusion
I've used Wink a lot recently, to make support videos and demonstrate bugs when software testing. The best thing is that Wink is easy to use. It's easy to make a video of some on screen actions very quickly. I recommend it!

Introduction
If you write instruction documents or you work on a help desk, you need to take screen shots and annotate them easily and quickly. Of course Windows has the standard functionality:

Press PrtSc (Print Screen key) to capture the entire screen
or
Press Alt-PrtSc to capture the active window

But what about the next step? Pressing the PrtSc key just puts the image into the clipboard and where do you save it? You can paste into a Word document - but really that is terrible, it is hard to see it and it inflates the size of the Word document greatly. If you are writing an instruction document then save your screen shot first, then insert it into Word, don't paste.

Somehow you really need to save the screen shot in an image format. But don't use Paint and save as BMP, you'll get a huge file. The best format for screen shots is PNG, you get a high quality image with a small size.

In effect it means there are a number of steps to getting a usable screen shot ready to use. What if you could reduce those steps?


Snipping Tool
Microsoft include a nice little program called Snipping Tool with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Learn more about it here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Use-Snipping-Tool-to-capture-screen-shots


Greenshot
If you are using Windows XP or you want to try something different, Greenshot is a good choice. When you press the PrtScn key Greenshot takes over, it allows you to capture a part of the screen, with or without the pointer included. It will be saved as PNG and opened in Greenshot where you can draw lines, arrows and write comments. Find out more here: http://greenshot.org/ and here http://getgreenshot.org/


Conclusion
I've been using Greenshot for a while now and the best thing about it is the speed at which you can capture a screen, save it as PNG and add arrows and other notation to it. If you have to quickly take screen shots to send to people for support, Greenshot is an excellent choice. I recommend you try it.