Open Testware Reviews

MWSnap

Overview -- Observations -- Maturity -- Project activity -- Platforms -- Support -- Documentation -- Installation -- Implementation -- Performance -- Similar tools -- Limitations

Overview

Reviewer: Danny R. Faught
Date reviewed: 2004-08-31
Version reviewed: 3.0.0.74
Maintainer: Mirek Wójtowicz
URL: http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html
Testingfaqs.org category: Miscellaneous Tools
License: binary-only freeware with redistribution allowed
User interface: GUI, hotkeys

MWSnap is a robust and feature-rich screen capture tool for all 32-bit Microsoft Windows platforms. I recently used it to capture screen shots for a professional-quality user manual, and I'm very happy with it.

Here's a picture of MWSnap after capturing an image of itself. This image was of course also captured by MWSnap.

MWSnap screen shot

Observations

Testers often decide to take screen shots to attach to bug reports in order provide additional documentation on the state of the software. The Alt-Printscreen method of capturing screen shots on Windows works fairly well, but the difficult part comes when you have figure out where to paste the results. It's important to save in a compressed format so you don't eat up all of the storage on your bug tracking system and make people endure long waits to download large bitmap files. If you want more control over your screen shots, you can try a screen capture tool like MWSnap.

MWSnap offers several different ways to define the area of the screen that you want to capture: the full desktop, a rectangular area that you lasso, a rectangle that's a previously-defined size (useful for creating icons, perhaps), and my favorite, the "Window/menu" option that snaps to any recognized object within a window or a container holding multiple objects. With the Window/menu capture option, I was able to capture individual dialogs within an MDI (multiple document interface) where Alt-Printscreen could only capture the entire application's workspace. The MWSnap window conveniently jumps out of the way just before you select the area the capture, unless you ask it not to.

You can initiate a screen shot using the GUI interface, or you can use the configurable hotkeys. In some cases, such as capturing the contents of a menu, you must use the hotkeys so that the menu doesn't go away before you can capture the image.

You can save images in five different formats: Windows bitmap, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF. There are different color depth and compression options that can be set, depending on the format. However, for PNG, it only seems to be able to save with 8-bit color, and there is a transparency feature that works for GIF but not PNG.

MWSnap includes a few extra features that are nice. There is an on-screen ruler that you can use to measure length in pixels, either horizontally or vertically (but not at any other angle). There is a screen magnifier that can be resized and zoomed in. A "color picker" lets you find the RGB value for any pixel on the screen. There is a "Window info" tool that shows you details about the windows you point to, including the exact location and size of the window, class name, and window handle. Also, you can flip and rotate the images, add a frame, and superimpose one of 20 different mouse pointers.

Maturity

5 - Production (on a scale of 1-5)

The few problems I had with MWSnap were all minor.

Project activity

2 - Inactive - (on a scale of 1-5)

The last release was in July 2002, so it's unclear whether we can hope for any more bug fixes or new features. There is an add-on language pack dated March 2003.

There are two web-based forums with light but steady traffic, so there is a small user community.

Platforms

The program reportedly works on any 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows (any version from Windows 95 and later). I used it successfully on Windows XP and Windows 2000.

Support

There are two online discussion forums hosted on the tool author's web site - one for feature discussions and one for reporting problems (plus an unused forum for announcements). There is a smattering of posts in both, spaced fairly evenly going back to the creation of the forums in 2002. Only about half of the posts have replies, so the odds for getting help there aren't great.

I hadn't gotten a reply from an email I sent the author after three days, but that's not enough time to draw solid conclusions.

Given that the source code is not available, you can expect that if you have any problems, they may never be addressed.

Documentation

The main documentation for the tool is in a help file that is accessible both from the Help menu in in the program and under the Windows Start menu. The help file is a walk-through of the application's user interface, which gets tedious, but it's easy to figure out what the program's features are and how to use them. Also under the MWSnap Start menu folder are a "Readme" file and a "What's new" file, both repeating information from the help file.

The MWSnap web site points to two reviews: "Catch that picture" (in English) from the Bangkok Post and "MWSnap: pohodlná kópia obrazovky" from SME Online, apparently written in Slovak.

Installation

MWSnap installs from a 643K .exe file that kicks off a very simple installation procedure. As an alternative, you may download a zip file and run the program from the folder extracted from the zip file with no installation required. I tried the latter option by saving the zip file to a flash drive and running the program from the flash drive on another computer. It even works when only the main executable is available, except that the non-English languages and the help text won't be available.

There are five languages to choose from during the install process (English, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish). Then 13 different languages are available when you run the program, which you can boost to 18 by installing an add-on language pack.

Implementation

Because source code is not available, I can't comment on any of the implementation details.

Performance

I didn't encounter any notable performance issues while using MWSnap.

Similar tools

I had been using the screen capture tool that comes with the freeware Microsoft Help Workshop, but I abandoned it when I found that the TIFF files it saved weren't properly formatted.

A number of other free screen capture tools are listed in the Screen Capture Tools Survey, published on Open Testware Reviews in October 2003. A frequently mentioned commercial screen capture tool for Windows is TechSmith's SnagIt.

Limitations

I only encountered a few problems while using MWSnap.

It has trouble capturing still images of video playback software. I get only black where the video is when I try to capture Windows Media Player in action, and MWSnap becomes unresponsive until the video playback stops.
Images are lost if you capture a new image without first saving the last one, unless auto-save is turned on. I usually considered this a feature, because it's easy to throw away shots that I don't want to keep.
Printouts at actual size are very small, probably because the screen resolution is far less than the printer resolution. It takes some tinkering with the magnification option to get a reasonably sized printout.
The software can only print to the default system printer.

The next list includes a few "nice to have" features that aren't supported by MWSnap.

It won't capture parts of windows that are outside the visible area of the screen. It also can't capture the entire scrollable area of a window, only the currently visible portion.
It doesn't capture the mouse pointer, though it does have a large selection of mouse pointer images that can be added to the image after the snapshot is taken.
It can't capture images of the Windows login screen because I can't run it then. (I can use a commercial virtual machine package like VMware to capture screen shots at any point in the process of booting or crashing.)
It doesn't have an annotation feature to draw on or add comments to the image.
It doesn't do optical character recognition to turn onscreen text into plain ASCII text.