Dear Awesome Screenshot users,

We hope everyone is remaining healthy as the Coronavirus public health crisis deepens. Actually, we feel sorry for the late response. It took us some time to finish this new version which will help more people to work remotely. We have to keep social distance. At the same time, working together remotely has never been more important.

Even before the pandemic struck, remote work accelerated around the world. Under these new circumstances we will now have to learn how to be productive when working from home in addition to learning how to collaborate with colleagues outside of the office.

Awesome screenshot has been about sharing the screen from the very beginning. The natural evolution for sharing the screen is from sharing screenshots to sharing screen videos. Video is playing a growing role in our work life, such as video conferences, video customer service, video product demos etc, especially in this coronavirus crisis.

There are two kinds of video, real time and non-real time video. Real time video, such as Zoom,  is a critical part of any video solution for work. We use Zoom often and love it. However, it doesn’t suit all scenarios. Here is a fun diagram from the Internet about a real time video conference.  It explains in some cases, such as a short discussion or demonstration, real time video conference may make our work less efficient.

Besides real time video communication, when we are working remotely, one important tool to work with our colleagues or clients is to share our work with non-real time video. Recording the screen is a great way to share our work in many scenarios, such as bug reports, design drafts, product tutorials etc.

With these considerations in mind, we have made significant improvements to the Awesome Screenshot extension and website in this new version that I am excited to share with you! Here we go:

New Extension Menu 

Video recording is now a core part of the extension. We not only added new features for video recording, but also arranged them in an easy to access way.

Instant sharing, fast and convenient 

Working together also means better integration with other applications.

Fast: Sharing video with colleagues is often very slow. With the new version, you don’t need to “Upload” the video, then share it.  After the video is recorded, you can share it instantly.

Convenient: We integrate video sharing with Slack, Trello, Github, Asana, Jira directly in the video page, so it is super easy to connect with your favorite services.

Record both your screen and  your camera 

Put your face in the video to make it more engaging.

Download as both WebM and MP4  formats

WebM is the default video format for Chrome. However, MP4 format is widely used.  Now, you can download your video as a MP4 file.

Fight coronavirus with free access  

Besides new features, we will also provide free cloud video recording and access before May 1st to support remote work and fight the coronavirus.

• Increase from 30s free recording time to 5 minutes free recording time
• 1 Month free cloud video recording and access for all

Free for educational use 

Please contact us through care@awesomescreenshot.com if you are a teacher and need to access the professional video feature for educational purposes. We will provide you free access for this semester.

Here is a brief introduction about how to use the video feature in this new version.

Don’t hesitate to let us know how we can better help you.

 

Jira Integration

Jira is a powerful issue & project tracking software. Now you can use screenshots to easily report bugs and send feedback to Jira through Awesome Screenshot.

 

Capture Improvements

Improved “Capture selected area” when you zoom in/out a page

Improved “Capture entire page”:

• scrollbar will not be captured in screenshots
• works better for pages that contain fixed elements, such as navigation bar
• support capture entire page of Gmail

Integrate with collaborative tools to streamline bug/issue reporting workflow

Are you a member of a quality assurance team?  Do you use awesome screenshot to capture bugs/issues and send them to your project management tools?  If you do it very often, you will find it’s a quite tedious process. Here are the steps:

1. Take a screenshot of the bug/issue
2. Save the screenshot to local disk as a file
3. Open your project management tool
4. Write a bug/issue ticket
5. Add the screenshot as an attachment to the ticket
6. Submit the ticket

With new Awesome screenshot for Team feature.  The workflow will be simplified as the following steps:

1. Take screenshot
2. Write a bug/issue ticket
3. Submit it.

It’s a great time saver for quality assurance teams.

Currently, Awesome Screenshot supports Slack, Trello, Asana, Github.  Let us know if you want to integrate more collaborative apps. Check out the basic introduction video to see how it works!

 

 

Support more cloud storage services

You can save screenshots to Dropbox and Box with the basic premium plan now. Saving to Google Drive is free as it was before.

 

Improve annotation interface

We redesigned the user interface of the annotation page to provide a better user experience.

 

Support dark theme

Finally, a dark theme for the popup menu is available now.  You can enable it in the extension setting page.

Let us know whether you like these changes or send us your feature requests!

We added four annotation types to make the annotation feature more powerful in this new release.

1. Call out

   We often point an area and explain it to others with annotation.   Call out feature is designed with this scenario in mind.

2.  Insert steps

 If you are using Awesome screenshot to make a step by step tutorial, you will love the “Insert steps” feature.

3.  Insert emojis

      Insert expressive emojis to add some fun to the screenshot

4.  Add picture in the screenshot

       With this feature, you can annotate the screenshot with any picture you have, for example, a special logo or watermark.

A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand pictures.

The new screencast feature allows you to:

1. Record tab or desktop screen
2. Download video as WebM file
3. Upload videos to your YouTube or Google Drive account