UseShots Editor is a little tool that makes screen shot based blogging extremely easy. Just take screen shots, annotate them and press “Publish”.

In version 0.4 you will find more screen shot related fatures.

This feature resembles the selt-timer in digital photo cameras.

The timer is used to capture interface elements that must be active when you take a screen shot. For example, expanded menus and tooltips.

The timer has 3 modes:

1. Off (default) - timer is inactive. The UseShots Camera captures the screen area inside the red frame the same moment you press “Shoot”.
2. 5s - Timer is active. The screen shots is taken 5 seconds after you press “Shoot”.
3. 10s - Timer is active. The screen shots is taken 10 seconds after you press “Shoot”.

1. Position the UseShots Camera so that the desired area of the screen is inside the red frame.
2. Make sure the element that you want to capture (expanded menu, tooltip, etc.) is also inside the frame.
3. Select the delay time (either 5s or 10s). Make sure this time is enough to activate the desired element.
4. Press “Shoot”. You wil see a countdown next to the “Shoot” button.
5. Activate the element.When the countdown is over the screen shot will be taken and inserted into the current screen of the UseShots Editor.

Hint: I can use your mouse inside the red frame of the UseShots Camera as if this area was a hole.

To paste any bitmap image from clipboard to UseShots Editor right-click on the image area of the editor and select Paste image. This option is only available when clipboard already contains an image.

With this feature, you can insert a screen shots:

• of the entire desktop - Press Print Screen to place a bitmap of the desktop into clipboard.
• of the active Window - Press ALT + Print Screen to place a bitmap of the active into clipboard.

You can use this ALT + Print Screen trick to take a screen shots of the UseShots Editor window, which hides when you take screen shots using UseShots camera.

You can also use the same right-click menu (Load image… menu) to load screen shots (or any other images) from files on your disk.

At this point, you can load BMP, JPG and GIF files.

• Improved quality of GIF screen shots.
• em and strong tag added to the list of the HTML tags you can use in your UseShots atricles. Other tags are a, b, i, u, div, span.
• User Agent - you can identify UseShots Editor in you web server logs by the “UseShots Editor <version>” user agent string. Previous versions used a generic user agent string.

UseShots Editor v0.4 has been tested with WordPress 2.3 and WordPress 2.5 (Check this post about WordPress 2.5 post editor, created using UseShots Editor v0.4 and published on my WordPress 2.5 blog.)

You can download the latest version here.

Version 0.4 is compatible with previous versions 0.2.x.x and you can install it on top of the existing copy.

Here is the updated Getting Started with UseShots Editor tutorial.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.