Microsoft is finally making screenshots in Windows way more manageable. The company introduced a new way to capture screenshots Thursday called Snip, a standalone app that lets you add your voice and doodles to screen grabs.
Snip is a lightweight Windows app that floats at the top of your screen so you can easily access it while you’re browsing or working in other apps. The app allows you to capture your current screen, an image from your webcam or create a new whiteboard image by doodling with a pen tool.
But Snip doesn’t limit you to static images and doodles. It has a built-in recording feature that allows you to add voice recordings as you annotate. Recordings are converted into video files that you can share via email, link or get in an embeddable format hosted by Microsoft.
Despite its beta label, the app is surprisingly clean and easy to use. As a longtime Mac user, I’ve always hated how unintuitive it is to capture screenshots on Windows devices. Snip goes a long way toward solving that problem while also adding new useful features. Recording your voice and annotations is perfect for a creating a quick explainer or highlighting specific parts of an image.
If you do choose to embed a video, Microsoft makes the process fairly seamless. You can see a quick example of the feature in action below.
It’s still very much an early version but it will be interesting to see where Microsoft takes the feature in the future. As it has with other new products, Microsoft is taking the approach of releasing Snip early and soliciting feedback from users to inform future updates — an approach that seems to be working, judging by the amount of feedback it’s received on day one.