atom thoughts

I am in the process of creating a demo for the GiftHat.com and I must say it is much more difficult than I would have expected. I thought I could just take some high resolution screen shots using Windows Print Screen and then shrink them down.

However, I quickly found that any text you have on your screen will be garbled to the point of ugliness when you shrink it even a small amount. I noticed that Ian over at UserScape has some great looking shots in his tour and he was kind enough to share his technique with me. He uses SnapZ Pro for the Mac and said it is very easy to use. Unfortunately, I don’t own a Mac so I ventured out to find an equivalent for Windows.

Thankfully, I found it in a great tool called SnagIt. SnagIt makes it easy to grab screen shots from just about anywhere on Windows and provides utilities for adding effects such as drop shadows and custom borders. It also flawlessly handles the scaling of text so that it looks pretty decent even at much smaller sizes than the original.

So, thanks to SnagIt you should be seeing a great demo for the GiftHat.com in the very near future.