Point, shoot, click, and paste with this handy trio of graphics utilities.
Rating: Very Good
A NEW NAME, a lower price, and two new sidekicks grace Mainstay's upgrade to its top-notch screen-capture and scrapbook utility. Captivate is really a bargain-priced suite of tools for multimedia-file management. The suite consists of Captivate Select, the screen-capture utility formerly called Capture; Captivate View, a graphics viewer that can also manipulate pictures; and Captivate Store, a scrapbook utility formerly sold separately as ClickPaste.
Screen Snapshots
The screen-capture features found in the Captivate Select extension are virtually the same as those in Capture. You take a picture of your Mac screen by pressing a key combination you've defined. If you want, you can select a portion of your screen, with or without the cursor visible, using Captivate Select's selection rectangle. Captivate Select will save the selection to the Clipboard or the Scrapbook -- or as a PICT, GIF, MacPaint, or TIFF 4.0 or 5.0 file -- to any folder on your hard disk.
Captivate Store streamlines the process of pasting plain text; PICT files; QuickTime movie files; and snd resources, such as system sounds, into documents and presentations. To quickly paste a file, you place your cursor in the target document and activate Captivate Store by using a key combination. When you click and hold down the mouse button, a hierarchical menu appears, showing the contents of a folder you've designated in the Captivate Store Apple-menu item. You can view text and PICT files, play QuickTime movies, and hear snd resources when you select them as you keep the mouse button pressed down. When you release the mouse button, Captivate Store pastes whichever file you've selected into your open document at your insertion point.
Captivate Store is particularly useful if you have a few dozen files, such as corporate logos and boilerplate text, that you use regularly in the documents you create. However, if you have hundreds of graphics files, you'll be better off using a cataloging program, such as Adobe Fetch or Apple PhotoFlash. Captivate Store lets you see only one file at a time. With a cataloging program, you can see several files at once and search for the files you want by using keywords or other identifiers. Furthermore, a cataloging program doesn't limit you to just a few file formats or the contents of one folder, as Captivate Store does.
If you don't have a graphics program for editing your screen shots -- or if you just need a quick, fast fix for them -- you can use Captivate View to scale, rotate, flip, and crop screen shots as well as PICT, MacPaint, TIFF, or GIF files. Captivate View can even convert a graphics file in one file format into any other file format it supports.
The Bottom Line
Captivate Select has always been a terrific screen-capture extension. Now that it's bundled with a useful graphics viewer and a limited but handy access-and-paste utility and has a lower price, it's a bargain to boot. / Shelley Cryan
