Snagit is a terrific, professional grade screen capture utility for Windows users (now also finally available for Mac users). Use it for preparing documentation or for documenting support issues with your software. You can learn more here: http://www.techsmith.com/snagit/default.asp.
One minor frustration has focused on its lack of integration to Gmail or other webmail. Here is a blog post with a good, partial solution that works:
Recent news that the China-originated attacks on human rights' activists targeted their GMail accounts have gotten many folks thinking about the security of GMail.
First, you should make sure that you have GMail set to use HTTPS connections. This is less essential if you always check email from within a secure network. Especially if you use public, unsecured wireless, you need to check this setting.
As email shifts to webmail, we look for the same desktop convenience. The "dragdropupload" add-on for Firefox allows you to "drop files into attachment boxes instead of browse for them or type in the filename. Drop multiple files and fill all the entries. In some websites it allows to add new upload files: in Google Mail is possible to drop the files directly over the. 'Attach a file link."
Among other things, this makes it really easy to send a snapshot from your windows desktop (such as with snagit) to someone via webmail.
At Thanksgiving time of year, we are supposed to reflect on things we take for granted. I want to acknowledge that I tend to take some of my desktop tools for granted. Case in point this morning: don’t take your browser or you web mail for granted.
More and more people use webmail as their everyday email program. Google GMail and Yahoo Messenger are the two most popular, despite some loss of desktop convenience compared to Outlook or Thunderbird. A big frustration is not being able to quickly forward a page you are reading or document you are working on as an email attachment.
