If you do training for others, or just want to share a tip with someone, taking a snapshot of your desktop of the item is often the quickest way to show what you mean. And, as a Mac owner, you probably already know the built-in way to take screenshots with OS X; simply click Shift+Command+3 to get a full screenshot. (For more options, here’s a great Apple “Quick Tips” video.) But what if you want to add things like arrows, comments, or highlights to the screenshot to really help the other person? Voila might be a great choice for you. Voila adds the ability to edit your screenshots and then mail or upload them (Flickr, FTP) to share with others.
There are a wide variety of editing tools available in Voila that help you create a very unique and detailed image, these include; drawing (pen, spray), text editing, blur (to blur out non-important sections), “callouts” (like speech bubbles), and others. Added to this are “effects” that let you crop, skew, and filter (black/white, sepia, etc.) your image, which means that your screenshots can now take on an artistic and professional look to them.
Taking a screenshot of your desktop and editing in Voila is fairly simple. Open the application, use the same key combinations as mentioned above, and Voila will store those images in its “Organizer”-tab collection. You can then edit any of them to add or remove parts, until you get the perfect image.
For me, however, there was a slight learning curve to using the program. While the provided Help does lessen this, the multiple tabs plus upper/lower panels were (and still are) less intuitive than I am used to. (Coming from a Windows environment where I have to do daily training on web applications, I have come to love the Firefox add-on, Fireshot (which unfortunately isn’t available for Mac). Fireshot has simple toolbars, lots of options, but without the “artistic” features that I usually don’t need for training, that Voila includes.)
Voila comes packed with lots of options, but some aren’t so obvious. The main tool bar at top doesn’t have an “Export” button, you have to use the menu bar to Save As. The application allows you to email but only to NEW email, not into one you might have started (like an Export might). Adding Text to screenshots is really simple, but getting the width, font size, and location where you want it can be a bit of back and forth. You will find that the “Select Object” (CMD-L) button will soon become your best friend in the program. Also, even though the main functionality of the program is on various tabs (Organizer, Tools, and Effects), the SIZE of those tabs seems to diminish their importance.
All in all, Voila is a very good screenshot editor that has all the features you would probably ever need, without having to use Photoshop for layers, or other photo editors for fancy filters. You can find out more at: www.globaldelight.com/voila/
If you would like to see Voila in action, I’ll be doing a short demo at the upcoming “Mac Geeks Mashup” on August 25th. (We’ll be working through how to create an “RSS Feed” training document.)
