Comments on: SnagIt 9 Or How To Take A Step Backwards In Usability

By: Andi

Andi — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:25:58 +0000

Thanks for your article John. I have to say, you had a simper time of it than me in Step 10 “Click Resize > Resize image – pretty much the same as SnagIt 8″. All I wanted to do was capture an image and resize it, but however I selected the image the resize options were greyed out. So my replacement (most effcient so far) for step 10 was:

a) Click on resize and find it greyed out
b) Click on rotate, flip, horizontal
c) Click again on resize and find it’s come to life
d) Click on rotate, flip, horizontal to get back to my original image
e) Click on resize and resize image
f) Confirm that I want to flatten the object
g) Choose my percentage and finally resize.

By the way, a few years ago I tried the *Microsoft* ribbon bar: once, during a busy project, and could find nothing that I needed. Tasks that had taken less than a second before took me quarter of an hour. I rolled-back to Office 2000 and I will never upgrade again… not to another Microsoft product.

By: KL

KL — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:06:09 +0000

Just noticed a revealing statistic in Add/Remove Programs:

Size of SnagIt 8: 27 MB
Size of SnagIt 9.1: 146 MB

Maybe this is a factor in the slower performance I was getting with 9.1

P.S. Betsy at TechSmith was responsive to my concerns (above) and shared them within the company, which is appreciated.

P.P.S. I still use SnagIt 8 just about every day, and love it. Whenever I recommend SnagIt, I always say, install 8, not version 9. I would encourage TechSmith to focus more on simplicity and having fewer features that are more valuable, while making snappy performance an absolute requirement.

By: Paris

Paris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:35:31 +0000

Sorry Usability people – you really missed some testing on ver 9. The thing I hate most id I can’t save the items as objects like I could in 8. Now each time I want to make changes to the original it is like starting from scratch. I pgraded but I neve use 9. it’s way to different. hopefully you will make lots of money on the new users.

PS I hate the black background. It make me feel depressed as I use it.

By: Jim M

Jim M — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:00:42 +0000

I’d be happy to test a new version but I think it will be hard for your team to understand that moving backwards is really moving forwards. SnagIt 8 is a tool I use on a daily basis. SnagIt 9 was not an upgrade. Keep in mind that keeping an application fast and easy for 90% of the things you want to do is better than continuously adding features and making screen grabbing so slow.

-Jim

By: Betsy Weber

Betsy Weber — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:23:37 +0000

Thank you so much for all the feedback. I have continued to send it to our user experience and Snagit teams so they hear your comments.

Would anyone be willing to help usability tests and beta test future versions of Snagit? We need your feedback so we can improve…

If you’re interested, drop me an email.

Betsy Weber | Chief Evangelist | TechSmith
+1 (517) 410-0030 | b.weber@techsmith.com
blog: http://visuallounge.techsmith.com
twitter: @betsyweber and @techsmith

By: Shawn

Shawn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:33:14 +0000

I agree, the new Snagit 9 is awful. Annoying pop-up balloons all the time, no classic view, convuluted interface requires a lot more clicking than the older versions. What they’ve tried to do here is dumb it down for retards. What they’ve actually done is stolen functionality from power users.

By: Alex Campbell

Alex Campbell — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:25:52 +0000

I have to take this complaint back about the Tech Support. They don’t control what the developers work on. They just take the flack for what the developers don’t fix.

By: Alex Campbell

Alex Campbell — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:34:22 +0000

Where is the old Snagit tech support fixing bugs almost as soon as you reported them.

I was using the scrolling feature in 8.2.3 and noticed that the profile description listed Auto Scroll even when it was Scroll Active Window. I wrote tech support about it and the following is their response. They have known about it, but didn’t fix it when they came out with 9.

The last fix to scrolling was in
10 January, 2005: Snagit v7.2.1 and there have had *18* minor or major releases since then!!

Response from Techsmith Support 05/14/2009 08:07 AM
Hi Alex. Our developers are currently aware that there are limitations in scrolling captures. This will be addressed in a future release. There were no updates to scrolling capture between 8 and 9 so if you are happy with 8, there may be no express need for you to update.

By: Gregory

Gregory — Sun, 10 May 2009 13:39:41 +0000

Hello all. I got here by Googling a complaint about SnagIt 9 also. Formerly an avid user of 8, 9 is a big step backward in usability. As an example, I’m not a fan of shadows. The process to quickly remove the shadow is a huge pain. (It would also be nice to permanently set the defaults of such things, ie, NO SHADOWS.) Betsy! Please take note. Thank you.

By: Sandra

Sandra — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:43:39 +0000

I’m the owner of the full version of Snagit 7 and downloaded the trial of Snagit 9 yesterday.

I was just about to post a review in my blog, because I couldn’t believe how clumsy version 9 feels compared to version 7. Then I found your post, so I don’t need to write my article any longer.

You are 100% right.

The ribbon bar in MS Office is all there is – so you know where to look. But in Snagit Main Window you have
- the menu
- the ribbon (which is empty in the main Window)
- the profiles
- the profiles settings
- the quick launch links
- the related tasks
- a little toolbar on the top right site of the screen
- the capture button

I was looking on how to save a change I made of a capture profile. Something which took me know time to figure out in Snagit 7, it was just obvious in version 7.
Here in version 9 I had to look up how to do this in the help file.

While downloading the trial of version 9, I was already thinking of buying the full version, just because I like version 7 so much and I thought that version must be even better. But now I think I stay with version 7.

In case you are wondering