Take screen shots - Greenshot

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.

Windows Phone - shortcut to turn on/off WiFi, Data, etc

Introduction

Sometimes when using your mobile you'll want to switch off the WiFi or Data (mobile data network, 3G/Edge). WiFi drains your battery, if you aren't using it, switch it off. Also you may want to turn off the data connection if you have a limited data plan. 

On an Android phone it's easy, there are shortcuts you can add to the screen so it's one click away to turn off WiFi or Data. But what about on Windows Phone 7.5? You have to go into Settings | Mobile Network, for example. That's a pain! It would be good to have a tile on the start screen.

Toggle

There's a free Windows Phone app called Toggle - download it from the market place. It allows you to add tiles to your start screen to get to WiFi, Data, Bluetooth and Airplane mode just with one touch.

Here's a link:

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/50d96319-ba4a-42f8-8117-279fadaa10f3

Conclusion

Toggle is simple and straightforward. However, it's not quite as good as what you get on Android because Toggle just takes you quickly to the screen for changing the setting - it doesn't change the setting itself. That means it's more than one screen touch. There's a feature called Double Bill, I don't think it's much good, it just takes you to the Data screen and then the WiFi screen in turn. I prefer the individual tiles.

Update - May 2012
After some time using Toggle I found a problem with it. The live tiles were not updated sometimes, it would say WiFi is off but it wasn't, for example. This was rather annoying. 

I'm now trying an app called Battery Saver, which also has the ability to pin tiles to the start screen to turn on/off the WiFi and Data. It's going well so far... I'll update this page later with more news.