Have you ever wanted to grab a screen capture of something on your desktop but didn't have the right utility program? Well now you do with Wisepixel’s HandySnap.

HandySnap is advertised as the screen capture utility that won't block up your screen and that is true. On the other hand, neither does PrintScreen. While PrintScreen resides on the taskbar when installed, HandySnap can reside either as a desktop icon or on the Quick Launch bar which I prefer. When launched, HandySnap puts an icon on the Taskbar as well.

(Ed. Note: Dave is referring above to a screenshot product called Gadwin PrintScreen, not the old Windows PrnScr utility which operated without any visible dialog and captured only the entire desktop to a .BMP file)

I like what HandySnap does best, which is not capture the whole screen if you don't need it. When you only want to grab a portion of the screen, the rectangle tool allows you to outline the area that you want or need, which you can then click to capture. But guess what? I can't grab a screenshot to show you. When I select the rectangle tool to grab a shot of the HandySnap Menu, it disappears! Maybe this has something to do with the way I have the utility configured as there is a pretty comprehensive options menu built-in. Using keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse lets you capture dialogs however, so reading the online help system is important if only to learn the shortcuts.

You'll get a preview of the capture and then by using the Save As option, you can save the screen shot as either a BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF or PNG file. I prefer the JPG as it’s more compatible with other programs that I use and the file size is smaller.

If you want to capture the whole screen, you can do that as well. There is a feature for allowing captures of a particular window and for repeating the last capture. I personally didn't find much use for either of those functions, but anyone who has to write product documentation or assemble and edit research or write and layout marketing material will find lots of use for it. Right after the capture you can send the screenshot to the clipboard or to a file.

On the second part of the HandySnap menu you will find icons for Inserting a Sprite, some Text (very useful), a Brush tool and a Draw tool. I personally did not have a use for the Sprite, Brush or Draw tools during this review, but I did have occasion to use the Text tool and found a small bug. When you capture a screen and would like to add text to it, you might like to add that text in white to stand out on a colored or gray background. When typing in the text as white on a white background in the editing screen, you won't see what you typed until you insert it. A small inconvenience, but still something that should be fixed.

The third portion of the HandySnap Menu allows you send the screenshot via e-mail directly from the program as well as capture the shot to the clipboard or to a file. There is also an icon to Open a File.