grabs

Not long ago, my uncle enlisted my help on a project he was conducting through the hospital where he works.

His task: to create a tutorial that would be used in an ongoing training course for other physicians. My uncle is a neonatalogist, chemist, and hobbyist beer brewer, but no video producer. Furthermore, there was little budget for his leg of the undertaking. He needed simple software to capture mouse movements on the computer screen--in the end, the freeware TipCam saw him through.

TipCam isn't the only screencast software out there, and it certainly isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. … Read more

Sothink Web Video Downloader provides a interesting twist on the crowded video downloader field. With simple operation, excellent results, and a surprising functionality, we were quite impressed.

The program's interface gets off to an excellent start with a tutorial video that lays out all the commands and functions perfectly. We never felt confused and were able to operate everything like a veteran. Not only could we input URLs featuring videos, much like every other video-downloading software we'd ever tested, but also a small pop-up would appear, asking if we wanted to save what we were watching at the … Read more

Sometimes in the workplace it's necessary to copy text or images from one source or another to different formats and destinations, such as HTML and PDF documents. PDFs are versatile, but it's time consuming to edit them when you don't have access to the original documents. Grab Text is a handy utility that lets you "grab" text and images from HTML documents and PDF files. Grab Text will copy text in both Plain Text and Rich Text formats. It can copy large amounts of hypertext from Web pages with few transcription errors.

Grab Text is … Read more

What began as a freeware project to easily share basic screen captures and screen recordings has grown into a solid application and capture distribution system with a premium component. Jing's attractive application takes a sound, simple approach to capturing; begin by dragging the crosshairs to define your capture field and then take a still or start a recording. When you're done, save it to your computer or upload it to Screencast.com (operated by Jing's publisher), an FTP site, Flickr, or YouTube (for a premium). If you've got Snagit or Camtasia Studio, TechSmith's premium programs … Read more

For years, Amy Jo Kim has been a well-known and respected member of the video game design community, as well as the author of perhaps the best book ever written on building online community.

But for the most part, through years of working on other peoples' projects--Ultima Online, The Sims, the virtual world There.com, Rock Band, and many others, as well as consulting for countless companies--Kim has played a supporting role.

That's all set to change. Kim, along with her husband and consulting partner, Scott Kim, are in the midst of what might be their most ambitious project ever: Building their own game company from the ground up.

Their start-up, known as ShuffleBrain, plans to announce the public beta of its first effort, a Facebook game called PhotoGrab, in a matter of weeks. On the one hand, PhotoGrab is a puzzle game, tasking players with matching small snippets of photographs with the full pictures they're taken from--and doing so against a clock that's quickly counting down. The more accurate the placement and the more snippets you can match, the higher the score.

But PhotoGrab is also a social platform that is built around the idea of encouraging photographers to upload groups of their own pictures and make their own games from them.

So, for example, after playing for a little while with a few of the games already in the system, I uploaded five pictures I took last summer while visiting the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Ky., on my CNET Road Trip 2008 project, and then spent a few minutes selecting small circular pieces of the photos for players of my game to identify. … Read more

Over the weekend I played with a very cool tool from video host GameVee. It's called Grab, and it will pull saved videos from the console hit Halo 3 and deliver them to the cloud where they can be replayed without the need of local hardware or Halo software.

Typically to watch these videos you must first find and download them through the in-game video browser, then run them in the game's replay engine. More importantly, gamers are only given a certain amount of space to host their videos, and can only share six at a time without … Read more

Here's a roundup of recent juicy Google tidbits:

• Amid general praise for Steve McQueen's famed car chase in the 1968 movie Bullitt, there are jeers about the recurring green VW Beetle and the geographic hash it makes of San Francisco. You might be amused to see this side-by-side view of the Bullitt chase and a Google map that shows just how much they jump from one patch of the city to another. (Via Google Maps Mania.)

• Ever wonder what the limits on Gmail activity are? Well, here's the answer, according to a Google Apps posting: &… Read more

Excellent screen capture apps aren't hard to come by, but excellent free ones are. With sophisticated features at no cost, it's hard to reach higher than Gadwin's PrintScreen. An attractive, easily navigated interface opens up a customization wonderland for users to decide default settings for shortcut key associations, capture preferences, and output.

For our purposes, the clicking and dragging regions is the clear choice. Misjudge your region's dimensions and Gadwin PrintScreen lets you readjust them without having to start over, something many commercial competitors don't do. Setting the app to automatically open each screen capture … Read more

We rant about eBay abandoning negative feedback, what happened to Heath, retro Internet, why Red Bull makes you cop a feel, Marky Mark and console gaming. By the way, lots of retro.

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Updated: Red Bull Commercial Boob Grab