Apple's Grab application is fine for taking screenshots on your Mac, but for heavy duty use it falls a bit short. Ask anyone that relies on screenshots for their work what they use, and you'll probably hear "Snaps Pro X." Don't expect that to change any time soon, especially now that this venerable screen capture application runs natively on Intel-based Macs.

Capturing an image of what's on your Mac's display is an important task for trainers, writers, or anyone else that needs to live by the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words." Snapz Pro X helps chisel away at those words by letting you take snapshots of your desktop, items on your desktop, or even capture movies showing your actions. It supports several image file formats including JPEG, PSD, TIFF, PDF, and more.

Snapz Pro X can capture multiple elements as a single object like this...

It also supports adding watermarks to your images, setting compression levels for images, reducing or enlarging the screenshot, adding borders to your images, and set color depth.

Snapz Pro X sports a live preview feature that can be a real time saver. Instead of capturing an image and then opening it to see exactly how it looks, the Preview feature lets you see what your final image will look like before you take the picture, complete with all of the capture settings you plan on using. Changing your settings automatically updates the preview, and the lower left corner of the preview image even shows how big your file will be.

...and Desktop elements like this. The highlighted areas in both images were added later in Photoshop.

Capturing movies is amazingly easy, and all of the movie settings are ready and at your finger tips before you start recording. You can choose what part of your screen Snapz Pro X should watch when recording a movie, or set it to follow your cursor. You can also force the recording area to certain aspect ratios -- especially handy if you know your movie must fill a specific sized space.

The movie capture feature also supports recording audio at the same time. If you are giving a live presentation that you need to offer online later, you can record what you say while performing your demo. Snapz Pro X keeps the video and audio properly synced, and once you are finished it encodes a QuickTime file with the settings you specify.

Not everyone, however, needs to record movies, so Ambrosia Software offers two versions of Snapz Pro X. For US$29, you get all of the Desktop image capture features. For $69, you can record movies, too.

Working with Snapz Pro X is so straight forward that you don't hardly need any documentation. You can set it to use the standard screen capture keyboard shortcuts included with Mac OS X, or set alternate shortcuts. You don't need to remember multiple shortcut sequences because you can choose whether you want to capture your entire Desktop, a portion of your Desktop, or a movie after Snapz Pro X launches.

Snapz Pro X 2.1.2 is also wonderfully reliable. It is substantially more responsive on my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro than earlier versions, performs flawlessly even with multiple displays, and works without a hitch in Mac OS X 10.5.

The Bottom Line
Snapz Pro X is an absolute must have utility for anyone that regularly takes snapshots of their Desktop. I use it daily to capture images for my TMO Quick Tips and articles, and I can't imagine how I would have managed all of the screenshots for my book without this life saver tool.

If you occasionally need a quick image of what's on your Mac's display, Apple's Grab is just fine. For everyone else, there's Snapz Pro X.