
Wouldn’t it be great to have a highlighter pen for what you see on your Mac’s screen? Right. When pigs fly!
Guess what? Pigs are flying. FlyingMeat’s FlySketch does highlight and annotation with screen captures.
If you do screen captures and send information to others, wouldn’t it be great to drop in notes? That’s what FlySketch does.
First, it’ll highlight anything on your screen. You capture a web page, then use the FlySketch tools to highlight whatever you want. Capture a whole screen, part of a screen, part of a document.
FlySketch tools let you make notes, doodle, draw lines, underline, highlight, on anything you see on your screen.
So what? The cool thing is that FlySketch does what isn’t really being done by any other Mac application or utility that I’m aware of. Drawing tools and screen captures.
Use the hot key to bring FlySketch to the front of your Mac’s screen. Change the transparency of FlySketch’s canvas, then you can capture that part of the screen. Using the tools you can then draw, trace, highlight anything that shows up in the FlySketch portion of your screen.
Graphic pros will like FlySketch’s support for tablets, making complex doodles a breeze with pressure sensitive drawing tablets.
I don’t recall using a graphic application that had such elegant ease of use. All the tool’s and buttons are just a click away. Once you try using FlySketch you find more uses.
Capture and highlight web pages, documents, spreadsheets, even PowerPoint or Keynote presentations. FlySketch adds drop shadows to graphic elements which makes them appear to float above the screen capture.
Once you’ve captured a portion of a screen, added highlights and annotations (cool name for doodling), what’s next? The final graphic can be exported to a variety of file formats for nearly any Mac application.
Export as PDF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG. The exports can be dropped into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Apple’s Pages or Keynote.
Hey, with a name like FlyingMeat, their software has to be good, right? These are the same folks who publish VoodooPad and FlyGesture, niftly little utilities in their own right.
FlyGesture is unlike any utility you’ve used on the Mac. It uses mouse gestures to perform certain actions on the screen.
VoodooPad is one of the Mac’s best note pads—complete with a basic editing window, search capability, to do lists, web export of pages, and sketching tools.
My favorite is FlySketch, since it does what isn’t easy to do in any other Mac utility. Screen capture, highlight, annotate, export to other applications. The pigs are flying, folks.
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By Alexis Kayhill | I'm a 20 year Mac user veteran, writer, photographer, wife, and mommy. I live in sunny San Diego with my husband, three children, two dogs, one mean old cat, and an SUV with a back seat full of beach sand. Follow me on Twitter.
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