Screenshot Captor 3.28 aka 4.0RC Beta Test - Mar 17, 2013 - Feedback Wanted

[mouser]

I have uploaded a new beta to:

• https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe
• Or if you prefer portable: https://www.donation...otCaptorPortable.zip

It's quite possible I broke something so I would appreciate feedback!


v3.28.01 - March 17, 2013 A.K.A v4.0RC

• [MajorFeature] Freehand painting/annotations; Like objects, can be edited after save.
• [MajorFeature] New (dockable) QuickCapture bar.
• [MajorFeature] Undo available for most object manipulation actions.
• [MajorFeature] You can now specify custom comment in post-capture pop-up dialog; option to add caption for this comment and/or store it in image comments.
• [MajorFeature] You can now capture shots from webcams (see Capture menu).
• [MajorFeature] New super-easy-to-use built-in image host uploader (currently using imm.io, more to come); you can still configure the use of ShareX or others if you prefer; warning given on first upload.
• [Feature] You can now save and load your entire configuration settings to/from different files, to make it easy to switch between groups of settings [see new menubar on options dialog]
• [Feature] You can now save all selected images to an animated GIF file.
• [Feature] Added Quick Expand Canvas item in Edit menu for quickly expanding the canvas around the image, which can be useful for adding annotations, etc.
• [Feature] You can now define your own custom list of preset sizes that will be available in all resizing/regionsizeselection dialogs and menus (thumbnailer, resizer, etc.).
• [Feature] Resizing and selection options can now work by percentages; you can also include percentage based resizing presets.
• [Feature] The last directory and file format used in the SaveAs dialog are now remembered; defaults to PNG format.
• [Feature] When moving old files into the archive directory, ScreenshotCaptor now shows a summary balloon tray message.
• [Feature] Active window selection and information capture is now smarter about choosing a window or sub-window within the capture region if capturing an area that does not include a foreground active window, or especially if performing an arbitrary region capture.  New option (See Window Capturing 1 options tab) to control this.
• [Feature] Added more color options for captions (see Automatic Captions tab in options to set defaults); better captions during printing.
• [Feature] You can now nudge objects in the same variety of ways you can use to adjust selection (use ctrl,shift,alt and arrow keys to move, grow, shrink); faster object nudging.
• [Feature] Selecting and adjusting objects now shows their position and size in status bar -- makes it easier to do fine adjustments.
• [Feature] Now provides tip on how to speed up saving with many objects and semi-transparency when GDI+ option is off.
• [Feature] New option to flatten transparency during normal saving (PNG images will not exhibit transparency but will preserve it internally for editing).
• [Feature] Added Edit menu item to copy current (or selected) image files to clipboard as shell file objects (useful for pasting in email programs, etc.).
• [Feature] You can now drop files onto the main window and you will be prompted to make some choices (copy or move files into Screenshot directory, add image files as objects onto current image, or switch to the dropped file and path).
• [Feature] Added option to check for updates at startup.
• [Feature] In addition to creating animated gifs, you can now display them in SC and easily extract frames (works same as for video files).
• [Feature] Added complete selection mode button to toolbar (lasso, freehand, magic wand, etc.)
• [Feature] Added new options for handling large captions (enlarge size of caption box to accomodate wrapped text, auto-reduce font size).
• [Feature] New option in interface tab to use chessboard pattern for background -- useful for working with transparent images (especially with transparent borders).
• [Feature] Added new specialfx operation to remove text/noise inside selection region.
• [Feature] You can now right-click on any clipart object and have it applied as a (tiled) background watermark; you can right-click clipart or frames and choose to view a preview in external viewer.
• [Feature] Added blendmode property to bitmap objects.
• [Feature] New option to tell SC not to save active window internal meta data to file comment meta data; useful if you are using images with an application that extracts and uses file comment meta data.
• [Feature] New buttons added to toolbar (copy to clipboard, select/resize preset sizes, etc.)
• [Feature] You can now configure what toolbar buttons to show.
• [Improvement] Major revamping of icons throughout the application by DC member Carroll D. (hamradio); Improvements to organization of menus.
• [Improvement] Improved alpha transparency rendering when saving images or printing; especially useful when objects are over transparent or semitransparent areas.
• [Improvement] Objects are now in front of paint layer.
• [Improvement] Added new option to use GDI+ libraries for alternate implementation of alpha blending and transparency (may be significantly faster when using many objects).
• [Improvement] Creating new blank image was not clearing transparency info; now uses transparency setting from resize dialog to decide whether to make new image pure opaque or pure transparent.
• [Improvement] Faster saving when image does not have transparency.
• [Improvement] Arrow text can now be edited in memo mode, which is more convenient for editing larger multi-line text.
• [Improvement] Launching of second copy now highlights the tray icon.
• [Improvement] User clipart directory is now shown at TOP of clipart list.
• [Improvement] Added more caption options, both in auto captions and in interactive caption dialog.
• [Improvement] Text boxes can now specify custom border line widths;
• [Improvement] Post-capture pop-up dialog now prints print-captions.
• [Improvement] Better print captions for small images.
• [Improvement] Post-capture pop-up dialog button improvements; remembers position better.
• [Improvement] Re-organized option dialogs for better readability.
• [Improvement] New options for post-capture dialog including options on where to show form, whether to show print previews, etc.
• [Improvement] Added new post-cap option to copy file shell object to clipboard.
• [Improvement] Repeat region capture will now repeat a caption of the region of the screen selected by a previous *object* capture.
• [Improvement] Some operations that changed directories was not forcing save of dirty file first.
• [Improvement] You can drag a folder onto the main window to instruct Screenshot Captor to switch to that directory.
• [Improvement] Improved application startup time.
• [Improvement] Added some tooltip hints to some controls.
• [Improvement] SaveAs folder and format now remembered and used in all places where SaveAs dialog is shown.
• [Improvement] SaveAs will now use default filename template, and default to a uniquified safe filename.
• [Improvement] Added option to enable/disable the retrieval of URLs from browsers, and a note about possible slowdowns when doing so; disabled Firefox URL retrieval option by default since it can cause serious capture slowdowns.
• [Improvement] The Moveto/Goto folder list is now kept in canonical state, handles blank lines, and has a new option to automatically add new folders to it, like a Most-recently-used list.
• [Improvement] Setup program will now offer to launch Screenshot Captor after installation, even on Windows vista/7/8.
• [Improvement] Better thumbnail panel sizing; no more horizontal scrollbar.
• [Improvement] Faster saving of partially transparent images with objects.
• [Improvement] When switching out of object mode, if an object was selected, it's bounding region becomes selected in normal mode; especially useful for applying effects.
• [Improvement] If user tries to select a region in Object selection mode containing no objects, SC automatically switches to region selection mode and selects region.
• [Improvement] Double-clicking an object in region-select mode will now switch to object mode and select the object under cursor; double-clicking in object mode toggles you back to normal region-select mode.
• [Improvement] The Watermarking submenu of the SpecialFx menu now shows all files in the clipart directory with watermark in their path or name, plus all files in user watermark directory; this makes it easier for addon clipart to include watermarks; see also feature for quickly applying any clipart object as watermark.
• [Improvement] Improved external tool configuration dialog.
• [Improvement] Removed old clipart directory; packaged now with DC member App103's nice clipart; moved old clipart into a separate addon download; removed separted Masks directory and rearranged Frames directory.
• [Improvement] Clicking on a clipart item shows it's full path in statubar.
• [Improvement] SC now creates a MyClipart and MyFrames directories in the user-writable SC folder where configuration settings are stored, and adds this to the clipart (and watermark) and frame folder list.
• [Improvement] SC no longer switches out of object mode when saving.
• [Improvement] Ctrl+A in thumbnail file panel now only selects files (not folders).
• [Improvement] SaveAs dialogs now have more advanced options that can be chosen for some image file formats.
• [Improvement] Better tracking of object manipulation for undo actions; better reporting of undo actions and indications of where in undo stack you are (shown on statusbar); larger undo buffer (from 10 to 100).
• [Change] Improved menu item names.
• [Change] Confirmation request when flattening objects to background.
• [Change] SaveAs dialog now tries to do a faster preview in images with many objects.
• [Change] Changed ordering of top toolbar buttons.
• [Change] SC no longer tries to delete objects that are cropped out.
• [Change] When you change screenshot directories, the "Autocreate JUNK folder" option is disabled, as is the "Auto move old files" option.
• [Change] Options dialog now has an "Apply" button to test apply any pending options changes.
• [Change] The internal file comment that specifies last active window region is now written at END of file comment meta data, and is only written if its non-empty.
• [BugFix] Updated ScDx ScreenshotCaptor DirectX capture addon (separate download).
• [BugFix] Last non-public beta release was not using unique %num% counters.
• [BugFix] Capturing windows file explorer was not seeing window title (path).
• [BugFix] Captions were not sometimes leaving a pixel wide gap at bottom and right of image.
• [BugFix] Improved flattening of objects and saving of standard file formats with objects+paint.
• [BugFix] Nudging objects was not marking image as changed; nudging objects is now much faster.
• [BugFix] Object arrows could reverse direction when image was resized or cropped or objects nudged; changing canvas size could sometimes lose arrow objects.
• [BugFix] Save selected region as new file was not working right.
• [BugFix] Functions to select region around objects and expand canvas around objects were not working right.
• [BugFix] Copy image to clipboard was not properly handling object layering.
• [BugFix] Fixing bug where application would forget it's non-maximized size+position on screen between runs.
• [BugFix] When antialiasing enabled, highlight boxes and text memos had a thin colored border even if border option for the object was disabled.
• [BugFix] Sometimes when changing zoom it would not reapply antialias settings.
• [BugFix] Sometimes font setting was being reset to default.
• [BugFix] Finally found and fixed bug that was occasionally causing some preferences (like object defaults) to be reset to defaults between runs.
• [BugFix] Improved border width around memos; effect of changing memo properties is now immediately visible.
• [BugFix] MoveTo folder list was corrupting long file paths.
• [BugFix] Hitting 'c' in region capture mode to set cursor position was sometimes leaving corruption overlayed on capture.
• [BugFix] When loading low-depth PNG files (or perhaps other non-png files), any alpha transparency added to background would not be saved.
• [BugFix] Some operations involving selection of files behaved erratically if thumbnail panel was configured to be hidden.
• [BugFix] Rotating bitmaps now respects aspect ratios.
• [BugFix] Top labels for zoom percentages were overlapping on large-text setups.
• [BugFix] Program was never saving changes on exit, regardless of the option to do so.
• [BugFix] Arrow objects could sometimes be created where the lines would be invisible.
• [BugFix] Fixed floating point exception that could occur if bitmap object was resized to 0 height or width.
• [BugFix] SC was not releasing hotkeys when you are on hotkeys configuration page, making it hard to reassign hotkeys; they are now disabled when on this tab.
• [BugFix] When scanning, scan DPI information was not always being saved in the resulting PNG file, which could cause printable page size to be wrong if image files were manipulated or combined at a later time.
• [BugFix] Some of the MoveALL and DeleteALL menu items were not always affecting all files if some were selected and some were not.
• [BugFix] Print margins, alignment, gamma, were not being saved between runs.
• [BugFix] When moving/copying/renaming files between folders entirely within the thumbnail browser panel (not using SC menus), the .object files associated with images were not accompanying image files.

Previous Beta (features still not in official stable release):
v3.13.01 - Nov 28, 2012

• [MajorFeature] Preliminary support for playing video files and extracting frames from them; and integration with Easy Screencast Recorder.
• [MajorFeature] First draft of new (optional) onscreen quick capture bar.  The look+feel of this will change dramatically in future versions.
• [MinorFeature] Will now autodetect and work with SharexMod in addition to ShareX (they are based on same codebase and the differences are not super clear).
• [InterfaceChange] New hierarchical organization of options dialog.
• [BugFix] When capturing the active window and main form was visible, SC sometimes failed to properly grab it; SC now does a better job of grabbing last active window, with less delay in reactivating it.
• [BugFix] Scrolling capture dialog could hide behind main window.
• [MinorImprovement] Scrolling capture dialog now has help button that links to online scrolling capture tutorial video.
• [Improvement] Small performance improvement in dragging selection (can still be slow to update tweaking selection size when zoomed out and resize filter is enabled).
• [BugFix] Scrolling the clipart (or frame) thumbnail panel very quickly could result in error about "List Index Out of Bounds".
• [Feature] Added new %numinc% field with a resetable persistent counter in options (see File Naming Template tab).
• [BugFix] Zoom and Navigation panel could be inadvertently scaled by mouse wheel.
• [BugFix] Minor spelling errors on tooltip hints corrected.
• [MinorChange] Ctrl+A now should work in comment memo to select all text.

[mouser]

oops i posted non-beta download url 

please redownload now from fixed urls above.

[dluby]

I have downloaded the beta and will report back.  I just tried the captions and they look good so far.

[bob99]

Just downloaded & started the latest beta. Haven't used it much yet but want to say thanks for

[InterfaceChange] New hierarchical organization of options dialog.

Much easier now to navigate to what I'm looking for.  

------

Edit:
Just tried the "EDITABLE caption" (taken from the help window). Still need to work out my steps flow but this is getting me closer to what I'vebeen wanting to do with SSC. 
THANK YOU!

[mouser]

Updated new beta version and updated the list of changes (i'm on a roll!).

[mouser]

New beta version up with bugfixes and tweaks.

[mouser]

I'd love some more testing -- especially in identifying anything i may have broken, as I'd like to release an official update tomorrow.

[dluby]

I just downloaded the latest version and it's great to see you continually improve SSC.

A few minor issues:

1. The Welcome Help page says version 3.15.1 but I guess it should be 3.16.1?
2. If you add a caption and then undo it, you have to press Ctrl Z twice, first to remove the caption, then second to remove the white area beneath the caption
3. The same goes for other undos, such as try using Edit->Crop with border effects. Maybe this is intentional to allow selection undo's of the various steps to achieve the cropping?
4. After starting SSC, I tested the Caption functionality and added a caption. However after adding the caption, the selected area isn't the full image. It seems to to be the selecting what would have been the size of the original image. A second capture and the selected area resembled the area of my first capture...  Sorry if I am not explaining it correctly.

If I get a chance I will continue testing and report back.

[AbteriX]

Just downloaded it. Here are some first thought.


Related to "Freehand painting"
- i use PaintBrush Opject
- i draw an circle with Paint Mode
- i utilize Flood Mode (within paint strokes)
- i guess that means i can fill inside my circle?
- i click into the circle .... the whole picture area is colored now?!!?

Also i try
- i utilize Flood Mode (within paint strokes)
- i try to draw an circle, because i think "maybe it is to draw an area?"
- but...the whole picture area is colored now?!!?

Do i miss something?
Isn't this Flood feature to fill an before drawn object?


Additional issues:
- i miss
an "hold Shift key to draw straight  horizontal and vertical lines"
and "hold Ctrl to draw straight lines but in an wanted angel" option.

- i miss
always an undo button in the right button bar.

[AbteriX]

I have tested a few more features i am interested in.


1) Quick Expand Canvas – works and seems to be very useful



2) Browsing the options dialog, I thought “wouldn’t it be fine to have the possibility
to use several different settings, depending on the work you have to do today?”
Means:  Option to Save and Load Settings
Also I often miss something like having an tray menu item: “Capture with setting foobar-01”
Or more general: "Activate Setting > foobar-01", the chose the capture method
and capture and set back with "Activate Setting > default".



3) On using "Spice out strip" and undo,
the "highlighting rectangle" has moved his position.
But the PaintBrush object e.g. not.
I guess all objects should remember there position.

That "Spice out strip" on its own is a very useful feature i have mentioned already, isn't it? Thanks for adding that.

[bob99]

Bug?
When editing the caption you can select all of the text with the mouse or keyboard fine.
If you right-click the mouse to do a copy the text changes back to unselected.
Ctrl-C works fine.

[mouser]

Thanks everyone for the beta testing, it is really really appreciated.

I have uploaded a new version and tried to fix some of the bugs found above -- and made lots more tweaks.. again I hope i didn't break anything but wouldn't be surprised if i did, since there are so many moving parts when it comes to objects and transparency now..

So please do try the newly uploaded beta again.

And now to address some questions above.

Splice out should now mostly work on freehand paint player too.  what a pain(t).
Freehand paint flood feature -- the enclosing area must be a freehand paint drawn region.  You cannot flood fill an area defined by the normal background of the image.  I may try to add that as an option later.  It sounds like you were doing it right though, so please try again and let me know if its still not working.

Regarding multiple undos needed.. yes i'm afraid i don't have a good solution to that at this point.  Undo is still slightly wonky.

[mouser]

There are quite a few new little tweaking options in this beta, related to speed of file saving (and to a lesser extent) drawing and zooming, when dealing with images that have transparency information and many objects on screen at the same time.

To speed things up if you work with lots of objects you might want to experiment with:
1. Enabling the GDI+ library option on the Drawing Objects tab.
2. Enable flattening or assume opaque object backgrounds on Image File Format tab.

[Ath]

It's a bit funny to see that the eraser is a few pixels wider then the pencil in free-draw mode. Until you want to fill the erased line with a different color and it doesn't fill the erased line-width...

Sample:

[xcopy]

Thanks for the new beta. Great stuff, as always.  

I played with the GDI+ settings and experienced the following:
When GDI+ is enabled and you draw a highlighting rectangle, the border color is taken into account when calculating the transparency. This happens even when "Border Color" is unchecked. I guess this should not happen in any case?
I made a screencast to clearify what I am talking about: http://screencast.com/t/5ElgqFpcnxD0
This effect does not happen when GDI+ is disabled.

Additionally (regardless of GID+ or nor) the repainting is not completely clean when you first have a border and then uncheck the border option. There still remains a tiny border of that color and a white line at the bottom. You can see this in the screencast above, too, at minute 0:22 and 1:06 to 1.08.

[mouser]

Thanks so much xcopy, that's a good bug that you caught.
Ath -- should I make the eraser use same size as paintbrush?

[mouser]

new version up, hopefully fixes the border color issue.
also i improved a weird maximization bug that was causing sc to forget the un-maximized size of its window.

let me know what other bugs you can find.

ps. check out the new arrow-text edit button -- should make it easier to put more text on your arrows.

[mouser]

Just a note about the new border fixes:  The graphics library can be aggressive about caching images, so you need to turn the border option on and off in order to see change of results.

[app103]

You seem to have "InverseColor" listed twice under paint mode:

[cschw]

My understanding of the '%num%' Image Caption option under Automatic Captions is that it adds a 3-digit auto-incrementing number in place of the field. 

However, the beta version shows %num% as seen below:

[cmpm]

ps. check out the new arrow-text edit button -- should make it easier to put more text on your arrows.

-mouser (February 23, 2013, 11:52 AM)

Has the arrow text feature always been there? And I missed it somehow.
Very good feature btw, never seen it in other screenshot programs either.

[mouser]

cschw, the %num% field is only for filenames -- can't be used in comments.

[cschw]

mouser, should the %num% field show up as an option under Automatic Captions?  Perhaps I'm just not understanding how it would be used in this context?

[mouser]

you are right, it shouldn't be there -- just a copy and paste by me.  i will remove.

[mouser]

Yet a new version up with more bug fixes and minor features.