Solicited Review: TechSmith SnagIt 2021

In today's episode, we are doing a review of the TechSmith Snagit 2021 uh product. Full disclosure, this is a solicited review. They were kind enough to send me along a review copy to uh to take a look at and see how it works. So, what's new in uh 2021? Well, there's a bunch of minor tweaks and things that improve on the application.

Number one, thankfully, finally, uh, we have dark mode, which to me is a big deal because pretty much everything I do is in dark mode on my machine. It's nice to have it supported. If you're unfamiliar with Snaggit, uh Snaggit is uh originally screen capture software, but now uh has evolved to be more of an instructional piece of software, and that's where I think it's most helpful is when you're creating stuff for people to be able to uh follow along. And it's got all the typical features you'd expect of a tool that's cre for creating instructional graphics. So, for example, let's go ahead and take a uh screen grab here of my R environment.

Uh and in the basics of the tool here, uh you have things like being able to highlight steps. So when you're trying to teach somebody how to do something, uh let's change this color to something a little more obnoxious. There we go. So you can say like this is the step one, this is step two, this is step three, and so on and so forth. Um Snaggit's primary, at least my primary use for is for creating uh instructional graphics as well as uh creating uh templated graphics, templated graphics.

Uh a lot of people use services, uh for example, things like Canva and such. Um I'm not a huge fan of uh web-based services because they don't work everywhere, uh, particularly on planes. Not that anybody should be traveling right now, it's the middle of a pandemic, but um it requires internet access and having an application locally on your machine, uh where you can store your templates is and stuff is to me is more reliable uh being able to just jump in do the the the headers for each show etc and um and get them out the door quickly new in 2021 for snaggit uh we have the ability to create and edit themes so setting your theme colors your fonts things like that which is always helpful um it seems like a silly thing to to have as you know a a major new feature but it's a nice thing to have because if you're creating stuff that is going to be uh for work uh and you have an official style guide this is a better way of managing it than having to reset those defaults every single time or what I was doing which was uh I have a whole series of saved projects um that I would just uh pop open now and just do that you can also create uh content from uh templates which is actually pretty cool um so for example if I wanted to do a certain type of template like a timeline I can just fire up uh a template here and start dropping in images and make uh a single consolidated graphic out of this could you do this in other software like PowerPoint? Sure. But if you're already doing the screen grabs in a piece of software like this it's nice to have it handy.

These templates again time savers. What's nice is you can also make your own. So if I wanted to take uh my daily uh screen grab thing here and turn it into an actual template I could do that and then um again instead of having to open up a the previous day's safe project, I could just go in and configure this for how I want it to look. One of the really nice things about this environment is uh it it's very very flexible. So if you wanted to make things like YouTube graphics, social media graphics things, anything that you would use a piece of software like you know like Canva for, uh you can have all that built right in and get to work and and crank stuff out quickly.

Um also really nice, you have all the typical defaults for exporting um in specific formats. The last new feature that I think is kind of fun is offset magnify. Offset magnify is useful for when you want to be able to highlight a particular part of the image. So let's go back to my in environment here. Um let's use simplify to clean up some of this clutter.

The Simplify tool has gotten a bit of a revamp and now has auto simplify. Uh that really does a nice job of just cleaning up your image. And so here it's it's already knocked out a lot of uh stuff. This, by the way, is really good if you're sharing um instructional stuff and you want people not to be distracted by the interface. Like I do this with Google Analytics screenshots all the time, uh, knock out everything uh on this image except the things I want people to pay attention to.

It's also really good and super important if you are sharing uh information of some kind that is partially or entirely confidential. So in the past I've done screen grabs of things like Slack. Well, you know, not everybody who's in a Slack instance wants their words to be made public. That's why they're in a private social media instance. And so having the ability to do a rapid simplify like this and just knock out a lot of stuff, and then you can go in and say, what are the things that I don't want to simplify?

You can take uh delete the things around them, and then you can uh you can have just the things that are relevant. Um, and let's drag that over there and just knock out some of these additional things here. So let's take a look at this magnify feature because I think again this is kind of fun. Uh, if I wanted to specifically highlight uh, let's do a rounded rectangle here. There is my magnification.

Let's take it up to 300%. Right. And then I can pull the magnification away. It's called offset magnify, but it's kind of like picture in picture almost, which is fun for being able to highlight it. This is the thing to pay attention to.

In this case, I'm highlighting this particular line of code. Again, when you're making instructional stuff that you need people to pay attention to a very specific thing to do, uh, you can just kind of if you wanted to draw obnoxious arrows all over your diagram, but being able to punch it out like this and say, like, this is the thing to look at is really kind of nice. So those are the major things that are new in Snagit 2021. The offset magnify, uh, which I think is is terrific, um, the ability to set your own themes, uh, a better auto-simplify, and of course, uh making and using templates to speed up your workload. The templates in particular, for one person, they're nice, right?

For a team, they're kind of essential because you want everybody using the same styles, and you want everybody using uh a common look and feel for your stuff. So that's where this is really gonna shine is when you have to have consistency across uh multiple people in your work group. Uh again, this is a solicited review. They sent me a uh copy of it to take a look at. I would suggest that, you know, if you're interested in it, go over to uh trustinsights.ai slash snag it.

Again, trust insights.ai slash snag it. You can get uh yourself a free uh free trial copy um to see if it works well for you, particularly for a lot of these more advanced instructional use cases. As always, if you've got questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel on the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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