Lightscreen: Praise the Lord, I saw the light!

Lightscreen is a screen capture utility that helps capture and manage your screenshots. It is very comparable to FSCapture, although Lightscreen might have a few less features. For example it has 3 different methods of capture: Screen, Window, and Area (a rectangle). It also has shortkeys that are customizable (and toggle....able) for all three of the above, and for opening the program window and opening the directory.

Speaking of which, Lightscreen's main feature (since it is on the front tab, and defaultly checked on) is that it can auto-save screenshots to a file. You can choose the folder, then set the filename prefix to be anything you want, then set a suffix being either a timestamp or just a number, so that each screencap will be organized and automatically named. Or you can even swap the two, making the custom name last and the date/number first. But anyway, you can then choose either JPG, BMP, or PNG, and the delay (the amount of time before the screencap is taken.

In addition to hotkeys and auto-file saving, Lightscreen also has a ton of other options, such as an optional taskbar icon, the option to hide the Lightscreen window when screen-capping, the option to show a magnification around the mouse when using the "Area" option, the option of either a sound notification or a traytip balloon when a screencap is taken, and even a screenshot quality adjuster. It also has "Advanced" settings like showing a "Save as" dialog for every screencap, including the cursor in screencaps, and the option to "Grab" only one monitor. Oh, did I mention it has multi-monitor support?

Overall, it's a nice little screen capture program. Like I said, it is very comparable to FSCapture, even though FSCapture is lighter, smaller, and more feature filled. Lightscreen is about 5mb in size and runs at 20mb RAM for me at the moment (though I am using portable). Oh, it's also portable, hosted over at PortableApps. It is also open source, if you view the files available on SourceForge. (It being hosted there anyway should tell you that it's open source.)

Visit Lightscreen website for download

Zorro: And suddenly, everything went black.

Zorro is a program to "completely blank the screen except for a rectangular area selected by the user." Basically, the program is just a see-through window (by see through, I mean it is just the border, and you can see the window underneath it) that you may move and resize, and when you press "Activate" or Esc, it blacks out everything on the screen except the selection. Simple stuff. But to go the extra mile, here's a few other nice things the developers put in:

-Choose-your-color: If you don't like black, you can choose any color you want.

-Blank Selection: Though the terminology may be confusing, it basically inverts what I said above, making everything in the box blacked out, and everything outside, visible. Kinda like a censor bar.

-Plenty of options.....FADE!:Always on top, activate on start, disable screensaver, hide taskbar or cursor, and a few more are some nice options to add to the mix. Plus, it has a really nice fade, which....fades....It looks nice, ok?

-Multiple Monitors?: I'll admit, I don't have multiple monitors set up, (for crying outloud, my personal PC is a 901 ASUS EEE,) so I haven't been able to try, but the website says that as of December 2008, Zorro has multi monitor support, which I just assume means that you can...use it on....multiple monitors?

-Hotkey: Win+_, for convenience.

-Portable version: (Ok, I've only looked at the portable version....) It has an INI file and a TXT, so it is portable. Plus, this means it saves your preferences. But there is a regular installer, which I have not looked at....but I'm lazy, so.....sue me....but don't.

You can imagine that the uses for this program are......out there....somewhere.....The website claims that Zorro is "especially useful for watching videos on your computer without being distracted by other programs." When I first saw it, I thought "When will I ever use that?" but for 94kb, it's tiny as heck, even if it does nothing. Plus, there's bound to be some uses out there. Maybe you want to be able to hide everything on the screen with the press of a quickey: start Zorro, make the window the size of the screen, set the quickey, minimize it to tray (another feature I didn't mention), and use it in the blink of an eye. Just one use.

Visit Zorro (gabrieleponti) website for download