So, once again, it pays to TwitterTM. I happened to be online when Techsmith (@techsmith on Twitter) announced that they would be doing a 24-hour marathon about one of their flagship products, Snagit, with prizes to boot. I was immediately excited because I am familiar with Snagit and it’s an absolute-must for anyone who blogs. Besides the allure of winning something, I was curious to get to know the marketing machine (@betsyweber is the chief evangelist) and developers behind the product.
It was a long event (24 hours) so I was in and out. The #Snagit24 videos by Techsmith are up online for your viewing pleasure, but back to my title about winning, I won a license of Snagit v10 and Camtasia v7. Slightly surreal and I’ve already put Camtasia v7 to good use with this first video about setting page breaks in Excel 2007.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uScQ7nJm1NQ
One of the first things I noticed about Camtasia v7 is that redesigned interface puts the focus on creating your content. With Snagit v10, there was the addition of an all-in-one capture mode which I absolutely love. With the previous versions of Snagit, there was an emphasis on Profiles and shortcuts to launch your capture modes. I’m not big on keyboard shortcuts because on my HP notebook, it’s usually a combo of Fn+PrintScreen or Ctrl+Shift+Letter. That’s a LOT of key presses so in the past with Snagit v9, I would have to:
- go to the quick tray in Windows (7) and rightclick on the Snagit icon.
- Navigate to the Profiles tab; Click on “Basic Profiles” to select the particular capture mode I wanted.
- Start up Snagit by clicking the tray icon or going to the Programs menu
- Click on the capture type I wanted and hit the “big red button” to start the capture.
OR
Now, the smart developers at Techsmith decided that instead of letting users do ALL the work, they engineered the All-in-one mode with which you can capture regions, windows, objects and scrolling windows (horizontally & vertically which is the holiest of Holies in my book). 😛 Needless to say, the addition of this feature alone is what would have made me upgrade from v9 to v10 because it cut down my fiddling time.
Some of the gifts they gave away includes books about making screencasts, Snagit, Camtasia, etc. I was lucky and won license to Snagit v10 AND Camtasia v7.
This was back in May. Also back in May, Digital Inspiration and Softonic EN ran contests in which they were giving away a license to Snagit v10 each. I entered both contests, but I didn’t get my hopes up. So this morning, when I received a message from Tom Clarke from Softonic, I knew that lightning had struck twice. 😛 He had emailed me to tell me I was the winner of their Snagit v10 license giveaway! 2010 is shaping up to be *quite* the year. 🙂
However, I could not (in good faith) accept the prize without telling him that I already had won a license to Snagit & Camtasia from a previous Techsmith event! So, I proposed that if he/Softonic was amenable to my giving away the license to a nonprofit organization (Free IT Athens at http://freeitathens.org), I would do so or they could pick another winner. Thankfully, that was an arrangement he & I could live with so Free IT Athens is now the proud owner of Snagit v10. 🙂
Update (5pm): FRITA advocates for the use of open source software so I’ve emailed Tom Clarke about selecting another winner.
The moral lesson through my rambling article:
- it pays to enter giveaways.
- It pays to enter multiple giveays. 🙂
- In my experience, the stuff I’ve won so far is stuff I use *daily. I absolutely LOVE my HP Touchsmart 600 and I nearly bit the poor husband’s head off when he suggested selling it to “upgrade” to a bigscreen TV. lol.
- Add value to the giveaways; My contest entries are usually thoughtful and honest about what I would use the item for if I won it. In my experience, I would say honesty is definitely the best policy.
That’s all for now. Good luck and happy hunting! 🙂