JShot

JShot is useful if often capturing (parts) of a screen and needing not only a program that does the capturing but one that automatically uploads it to the web. JShot can capture full screens, active windows, rectangular sections, the task bar and the desktop among others. It has a built-in editor with undo and redo support in addition to adding text and other effects to the captured image. The image editor does a lot more including but not limited to lines and shapes and other operations like resize, rotate, crop, merge and blur.

JShot comes pre-configured to upload anonymously to imageshack but out of the box it also supports uploading to FTP, Skype, Twitter, Picasa and Dropbox. These require setting up login details using the configuration wizard (accessed via the Ctrl+F12 keys by default). For example the Dropbox plugin tries to open the dropbox site and add the capture to the your Dropbox’s private or public folder. The aforementioned configuration wizard (also accessible via the tray icon) includes settings for such things as capture delay – how long after clicking to capture does it actually happen – output format – default is *.png – and multi-monitor support and more.

Plugins can be developed to support other sites to upload to. JShot keeps a history of of its captures (View—>History). When installing the user can choose to integrate it to the Windows right click or context menu. JShot requires Java Runtime Environment 1.6 and is free for personal use.

 

Raindrop is one of the latest attempts to centralize all messaging and social netwroking activities on the web. It is an as yet unavailable prototype from mozilla messaging,  the people developing the Thunderbird email client.
At first look at the early screenshots and concept videos available at the above site it looks like the developers are trying to aggregate all activity, twitter, email, youtube etc. into one place. As such this is not necessarily a new idea and places like Friendfeed (the link is to RGdot.com’s Friendfeed page) come close to doing that right now. I think what Raindrop tries to improve on is that experience but by allowing better syncing between devices, promising more customization and above all using an engine that can decide and help the user divide messages between the important or personal and the bulk or the spam – without going through filters or forever browsing through junk -  it can be even more. Not to mention that this is an open source project which goes beyond supplying an API, like most services like twitter already do. Raindrop aims to allow it to be used to store info locally or on a server. All these therefore make it really fully extensible and customizable.
A promising new tool which may be able to stake a place on many desktops and gadgets.

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