Long ago I wrote about www.jingproject.com (a free and cool screen capture software), but recently I was made aware of a “competitive” product called PicPick which is equally free and cool.
Compared the two products offer some advantages over each other;
Jing: Upload directly to screencast, video capture possibility and also a layered approach (when adding text and arrows onto captures).
PicPick: Lots of different capture modes (eg. freehand) and a build-in graphics editor in which you will work with your capture (ala Paint from windows).
Both:Hotkey support (pipick even separate hotkeys for the different capture modes), option to add both text and arrows to the capture to underline your point.
Which is better is hard to say – I guess it depends on what kind of captures you do the most.. A merge of the two products would be ever so cool 🙂
I think PicPick offer some great options when talking capture modes and also the build in editor is nice, it is however annoying that the editing is not layered (if you add an arrow it is added into the graphics and cant thus be changed later as opposed to Jing). Maybe you will just have to have both 😉
Get PicPick free here; http://www.picpick.org/home
Get Jing free here; www.jingproject.com