Screen sharing lets you show someone your computer screen across the internet. Usually, you can even let a viewer take over the mouse and keyboard. I use screen sharing at work to help my co-workers with computer problems, and sometimes, even I get help. Often, people use screen sharing applications to give business presentations online.

Previously, my favorite screen sharing service was TeamViewer. It’s a free service, and it even includes voice and video chat. Now I am starting to use a different service, called Join.me.

Join.me is probably the simplest screen presentation service I’ve used. All of the these services require an installation of software on your machine. Usually, both the broadcaster (host) and the viewer (client) need to install something. Join.me breaks out of the crowd by not requiring the viewers to install any software. All they need is a modern web browser with Adobe Flash.

Here’s how it works …

1. Go to Join.me

2. If you wish to share your computer screen, click on the sharearrow.

3. This will start a download of the server software. (Windows and Mac)

Once you have it installed and running, you’ll see the Join.me floating toolbar at the top of your screen.

4. Click once in the address bar and you’ll be able to copy or send the sharing address.

5. The person you wish to share with, can either click the link you’ve sent them, or type the 9 digit number in the Joinbox at the Join.me website.

6. As soon as they join, you are sharing your screen. That’s when you can start using your floating Join.me toolbar to control the session. As far as I know you can invite any number of people to your screen sharing session.

The phone icon actually lets you call them on a conference line. I haven’t tried that feature because I usually call the person on my phone or use Google Voice to chat with them.

This service and it’s operation is best explained by watching this video.

Join.me quick preview and tutorial from Andy Traub on Vimeo.

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Techie Buzz Verdict:

Join.me is a great service, it’s easy to use and it’s free. What more do you want? Actually, I would like to have video chat, but this service is still a winner for the viewers. They don’t need to install any software to see your presentations.

I’ve got plenty of ways to share files online, but so far, I haven’t found an instant screen capture tool to share images online. While visiting WebDomination, I ran across a tool that may solve that problem.

Have you ever heard of Droplr, the Mac application for sharing Links, Images, Notes and Files? Now there’s a system tray app for Windows, called WinDroplr, that gives you some of the same features.

You can download the installation file at WinDroplr.com, it’s about 700k in size, but requires .NET 4.0 Framework, if you are running WinXP.

Once installed, you’ll have a windroplr icon in your system tray. To use the program, click the systray icon once to show the floating drop zone in the bottom right corner of the display. Once it’s up, you can drag URLs, text and images from your web browser into the drop zone. Once the item is uploaded to droplr.com, you’ll get a brief notification above the systray. Click on the notification before it disappears to copy a short URL to the upload.

You can also use WinDroplr to share files and collections of files. Drag them from an explorer window onto the drop zone. If you’ve selected more than one file, it will create a zip archive before it uploads.

Another feature lets you take and upload screenshots by right clicking into the systray icon’s menu.

The short URLs generated by WinDroplr are some of the shortest around. Somehow it offers integration with your Twitter account, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Below is a video showing WinDroplr being used.

Download

WinDroplr.com

Techie Buzz Verdict:

I love the ability to quickly share links, files, notes and images. The drop zone is a pleasure to use, and the built in screenshot tool is my favorite feature. I’ll be keeping this one around and I recommend it.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

If you are looking for an alternative to SnagIt, the popular screen capturing software, JShot is an excellent option. To be honest, it doesn’t have all the features that SnagIt has, but it has plenty of them to make it a worthy alternative that is free. Once installed on your Windows or Linux machine, JShot will stay in your system tray and can be easily launched to capture a region, the desktop area, the active window or the full screen.

Once captured, the image can be saved or edited with the JShot editor. In addition to the basic features of cut, crop, rotate, flip and Merge, JShot editor also lets you add text, shapes, lines and arrows to your image. Alternatively, you can use the pen, rubber or bucket tool to add effects to your image or create and remove anchor shapes. You can also add other filters to your image including blur, sharpen and grayscale. A config wizard also lets you save various settings such as image format and default external editor.

JShot also lets you upload images to online services. Currently, it only seems to be working for ImageShack though. However, it probably has the simplest uploading process of all. Once you click the upload button, JShot would automatically upload the image to ImageShack and copy the direct link to your clip board. No need to register, sign in or even open a browser window.

Download JShot here.

Techie Buzz Verdict:

JShot is one of the best screen capturing utility that is free. It is hard to believe they offer so many features without charging a penny. The interface can be tweaked a little but the usability is fantastic.

Rating: 4/5

While browsing the web, sometimes you would like to capture a screenshot from the browser itself. If you love using Google Chrome and want to capture a screenshot without using any other utility, Webpage Screenshot extension will be useful.

This extension provides three preset options – capture the visible region, capture entire page and capture after resizing the browser window. After installing the extension, you will see an icon placed just to the right of the address bar as shown below:

You have the following three options to take the screenshot from Google Chrome:

Capture screenshot of the whole page: Click the “All page screenshot” button and the extension captures the full screenshot and opens the image in a new tab.

From the new tab, you can select to zoom into the image and save it in PNG format.

Resize the image before the capture: This feature lets you first resize the browser tab and then capture the screenshot. To do that, select the desired width and height of the image that you want from the drop down menu.

Capture screenshot of only visible region of a page: This feature is unique and I haven’t seen the same in other browser extensions or Firefox add-ons. You can click the “Visible screenshot” button to capture only the portion of the webpage which is visible in the screen. So if you want to capture an area which lies in the bottom of the page, scroll down and hit the”Visible region” button. (also read: Aviary Google Chrome extension for capturing screenshots)

Techie Buzz Verdict

The extension is good since it comes with preset options but you cannot select a region using your mouse and capture an area. This is the most desirable feature required in a screenshot application, which is missing.

Techie Buzz rating: 3.5/5 (average).

Desktop Tweet is a nice free tool that can capture screenshots on your machine and tweet them.

1. Download Desktop Tweet and install it on your PC.

2. After it is installed, start the tool.

3. You’ll find an icon in the notification area, right-click on it. Select Tweet Snapshot. You can select Settings to enter your Twitter account details.

4. Now rescale the capture frame as per your needs. After it is properly located, double-click on the frame.

5. The tool will now prompt you to select the image service you want to use. You can also add text to the image. When you are done configuring the upload, just press the Submit button to tweet the screenshot.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

Twitter is a major network everybody uses now and tweeting screenshots is an anytime necessity for any Twitter addict. This light-weight tool makes this task pretty easy. To get a screenshot you do not need to rely on any other tool. Desktop Tweet has in-built tools that can capture your screen and tweet them as well. It supports several uploading services which include Twitpic, yfrog, Twitgoo, Pikchur and Posterous.

Techie-Buzz Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

SnagIt for Mac

There are many screen-capture applications for Mac like Skitch, but Mac users have long been waiting for a screenshot app for Mac, which match the capabilities of SnagIt for Windows. SnagIt is basically a screen-capture application program, that creates an image of what you see on your computer monitor.

SnagIt for Windows, is undoubtedly the most advanced and user-friendly screen-capture software application. SnagIt has officially unveiled the Beta version of SnagIt, for taking screenshots on a Mac. The interface is very different from the Windows counterpart, but that is understandable considering that the Windows version uses the Office 2007 Ribbon UI that Microsoft has not made available for Mac applications.

You can download free Beta version of SnagIt for Mac from here.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

It offers an all-in-one capture mode that tries to detect whether you want to grab the full screen, a window, a specific region, or even a scrolling area. Many small things are worth appreciating, like the small magnified window when capturing a region. The awesome thing about the magnified window is that it does not actually appear until your cursor isn’t moving much on the screen. That makes sense because when your cursor is only moving a few pixels at a time is when you are probably trying to get a pixel-perfect screenshot, and that is when you need the magnified area.
Overall, there are a lot of nice touches in the app. You can use keyboard shortcuts, the Menubar icon, or the hide-away window to initiate a capture. SnagIt for Mac is not full-featured yet though, and you will notice that as soon as you click on the Effectstab where all you will see is a Coming soonmessage. The things that are available work very well though.

Techie-Buzz Rating: 3/5

Aviary is the most simple way to capture screenshots without having to use any additional software. The Aviary extension for Google Chrome adds a small toolbar icon which will allow you to quickly capture webpage screenshots and download them to your PC or share them with your friends.

In addition to that, it also provides several other shortcuts to edit image and video files.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Aviary is definitely a time saver when it comes to capturing website screenshots. The extension can come in pretty handy when you want to capture screenshots without having to launch any external software.

The Google Chrome Extension for Aviary also allows you to sign in to your Aviary account, allowing you to quickly post the screenshots to your associated Facebook or Twitter account.

Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

Download Aviary Extension for Chrome

One of my favorite screen recording software is Camtasia Studio. But it cost 299$. It is almost impossible to spend that amount just for a basic screen recording software. So today, I’m presenting an unique screen recording software, that you can grab without spending any money.

Super Pick is an amazing program that can be used in capturing as well as recording screen activities. It can be used only for basic screen recording. You can not only record your desktop, but you can also record movies and games with this unique tool. This program is simple and easy to use.

You can record your desktop in full screen or you can even select fixed region to capture and record screen activities. It records audio as well as video and save it in a video file. It tries to keep the file size as small as possible.

You can choose video and audio codec as well as the output quality. You can save your video in any of the four supported formats, i.e. AVI, FLV, SWF and MP4. The output was quite impressive. It does not take much time to save the file. Don’t expect professional screen recording with this program. If you are looking for a basic screen recording software, this one will fulfill most of your needs.

[ Download Super Pick ]

SiteShoter is a small utility that allows you to save a screenshot of any Web page into a file. You can use SiteShoter in user interface mode, or alternatively, you can run SiteShoter in command-line mode without displaying any user interface.

It automatically creates hidden window of Internet Explorer, loads the desired Web page, and than save the entire content of the Web page into an image file (.png, .jpg, .tiff, .bmp or .gif). You can also use SiteShoter to convert .html file on your local drive into image file.

SiteShoter is very small and useful utility. You can select the screen resolution of your web browser as well as the resolution of the image file to be saved in your computer. It has has the option to disable flash, so that the flash contents are not displayed in the image.

This utility works on Windows XP, Window 2003 Server, Window 2008 Server, Windows Vista, and Windows 7

[ Download SiteShoter ]

There are literally hundreds of tools for taking screen shots, then why would be bother telling you about a new one? The reason lies in the unique features of ScreenSnapr.

ScreenSnapr is a light-weight application that not only allows you to capture screen shots effectively, but also lets you   upload and share them with minimal keystrokes. After you have installed ScreenSnapr on your computer, all you need to initiate a screen capture is press Ctrl + 1. Then simply drag out the area you want to capture and the image will automatically be uploaded to the ScreenSnapr servers.

You can also specify a folder on your own server and images would automatically be uploaded to that folder. If, instead, your purpose is to share the screenshot with others, ScreenSnapr will provide you with a shortened URL of the uploaded image using is.gd that you can share over email, chat or IM.