The Interface

As you can see LittleSnapper presents itself in a standards conform interface, which helps to jump right into creating your snapshot selection. On the left, you have a sidebar that shows you how your library is organized. The main area either shows all your snaps or serves as the editing window. To the right you can show the Inspector and at the top you have a search bar that allows you to stay on top of your library.

In the sidebar you can create folders, Smart Folders and Collections.
Smart Folders work like your typical Mac OS X Smart Folder and allows you to intelligently order your library, in contrast Collections are similar to Albums in iPhoto. That means one snap can live in more then one Collection at once, whereas images can only reside in one plain folder.

Snapping pictures

The actual gathering of images from your screen or a web page couldn't be simpler. LittleSnapper replaces the shortcuts of Grab, so you don't have to learn new keys. God I love it when an application respects my muscle memory.

In addition to the standard screenshot options Window, Full Screen and Area, you get two new features. You can either use the menu bar icon to snap the page that is open in your favourite browser — LittleSnapper supports all the major ones (Safari, Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb, Flock and Opera) — or you can open the web page in LittleSnapper's own browser, which gives you the additional option of snapping only a part of the page.

For partial web snaps you are aided by DOM snapping, which automatically snaps your selection to the HTML element your mouse is hovering over. Once you are happy with the DOM selection, you click on the page and then you have the option of adjusting your snapping rectangle or to take the snap as is. Very simple and effective.

When taking a snap, the URL gets saved and the image is named after the browser's title. It is pretty cool, that LittleSnapper automatically saves the page's source code and the URL together with the snap. That way you can pick apart a web page later on. A great option for web designers. Unfortunately, there is no support for source code saving when taking partial web snaps yet.

Working with a snap is a snap

Pardon the pun, but it actually is very simple to annotate the snaps. You have several options that are all non-destructive, which means, that you can go in and edit them later.

Options for annotation include:

• Masks (you are able to combine several masks for complex shapes)
• Rectangle Blur (a little trick — that is not yet mentioned in the manual — is that you can switch between blurred, filled and outlines rectangle with the "f" key)
• Rectangles and Circles/Ellipses, both of which can either be filled or just have a border of chosen thickness or color
• Lines
• Arrows
• Text
• Crop (not shown in the toolbar, but available via the menu)

For pretty much all of these you have a variety of options like stroke thickness, color, blur strength, opacity, font options, etc. And you are able to combine them to your liking, layer them how you desire (which unfortunately does not yet work with the Blur tool, so there are no blurred lines or circles yet).

For further annotation there are, of course, the usual fields to fill out. You can name your image, tag it, rate it and write a longer description. LittleSnapper also saves the date the snap was taken on and remembers to which services you already uploaded your snap. Which brings us to…

(Web) Sharing

Once you are happy with your masterpiece, you might want to share it with the world. Of course, you could just export the image as PNG, JPEG or PDF either with or without annotations. The PDF also gives you the option of paginating your web export and it saves as text selectable PDF.

Or even simpler, you want to write a mail? Just drag and drop a snap out of LittleSnapper into Mail (or any other app for that matter) and voilá! Done.

But what about web sharing? LittleSnapper got has you covered here as well. You can upload via FTP (great for blogging), via Flickr or via their own service called QuickSnapper to which you get a free account with every LittleSnapper license. All three are very easy to set up, in fact you are able to create a QuickSnapper account from within LittleSnapper. Just fill in your account details and press save. From then on you have one click (actually it is two clicks) access to all three services.

The upload is fast and painless and you get a convenient little window that allows you to visit the uploaded image on the service's page, copy the URL to the page or copy the HTML code needed to link to the image.

Once you have uploaded to a service, LittleSnapper makes note of it in the images Inspector window and allows you to easily go back to the shared image on the web, just by clicking on the published item in the inspector. Easy as pie.

What I am missing is the ability to call up that nice sharing window again later. It is just a bit of a hassle to go to the web page to get the sharing code or URL. I hope that is coming in one of the future versions.

Summary

Overall, I am very happy with LittleSnapper. There are other screencapture and web snapping tools out there, but having all in one application that is easy to use and that also includes a good library is very nice. For a 1.0 release there in not much more to be desired. Sure, some features can be improved and some quirks still remain, but hey! 1.0! 'Nuff said.

For the next release I'd like to see a bit more polishing on the individual tools. For example, the arrows only bend in one direction and there is no way to change that. Maybe add in the option to control the degree of bending. Or make the layering system also work for the Blur tool.

The price comes in at $39 US (5-user Studio licenses are available for $129 US), which might be a little steep, especially as there are free tools that do basically the same. But it comes down to the basic idea of supporting the developers or being happy with a free application. I think if you really need to take screenshots and web snaps for your line of work, then LittleSnapper is a great tool at a great price. If not, you might be better off with Paparazzi or the Skitch Beta (as long as Skitch still is in beta).

Now for the fun part. The good folks at Realmac Software have provided me with a license for LittleSnapper and a license for Rapidweaver — their great template based web publishing tool — to help kick off their LittleSnapper launch. To get this bundle please leave an actually useful comment (no "Cool post!" thingies please) and I will pick a random one within the next week.

I will update this post once the drawing has ended.

Update: And the winner is Paul Randall. Congratulations. Have fun with Rapidweaver and LittleSnapper.

Disclaimer

I was on the LittleSnapper Beta and this test is based on said Beta, not on Version 1.0
I did not receive any sponsoring from Realman Realmac Software for this review, except the two giveaway licenses.

Author: Alexander Kucera