Microsoft Snip Beta Arrives

A new screen snipping and annotation tool, Snip, has been released by Microsoft for Windows users as a beta preview today.

Once installed and running it replaces your standard Windows Print Screen functionality and allows you to capture whatever area of your current screen you choose or you can capture the input of a camera attached to your system. Once snipped/captured it is inserted into the Snip Editor and gives you annotation tools similar to those in Microsoft Edge's inking features.

One additional option Snip provides is the ability to provide a voice over so that you can annotate a snipped image and discuss it at the same time.

Snips with voice overs can be uploaded to the Office Mix website for easily sharing a link via email, embedding it into web pages or saving as an MP4 file.  Snips without any voice over annotation can be shared via email, copied to your clipboard and imported into other programs or saved locally.

This program has some great potential and it would make a lot of sense for this to become part of the standard screenshot capabilities in Windows in the end.

It is a beta preview so there are some limitations such as limited sharing options but if this eventually becomes integrated with Windows Print Screen or even the Snipping Tool then it can use some of the systems sharing features. It also does not sync across devices which should be a normal thing these days.

You can browse through the gallery to see screenshots of Snip in action.

I have also embedded a voiced over Snip below to show you how that part works. The embed code defaults to 960 x 560 but I had to squeeze it down to fit into our column width here at the site. You can use the full screen button for better viewing. I also find the sound quality to be very rough but I was using the embedded microphone on the HP Spectre x360 as the device sat on my lap in tablet mode.

But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.