Author's note: I'm reposting this news from the Visual Lounge.

Guess what the biggest feature request is for Snagit? For years, the number one feature request has been to bring Snagit to the Mac platform.

Today I'm happy to announce that this feature request has been fulfilled! Please help us celebrate the release of Snagit on Mac today!

Snagit was built from the ground up just for Mac users. We had input from over 100,000 beta testers that helped us build it.

Snagit on Mac has lots of great features and functionality, including:

• Capture: Snagit allows users to capture any image from their screen at the click of a button or hotkey, including scrolling web pages, windows, images and regions or areas of the screen.
• Snagit Editor: Edit captures with callouts, arrows, lines and numerous other finishing touches. Users can manage recent captures in an image tray and drag multiple images from the tray to the canvas to combine them. All screen captures are automatically saved, allowing users to grab multiple images, and work on them later.
• Share: Easily share captures by saving in a range of popular image formats or exporting with a single click to emails, FTP sites or to Screencast.com, TechSmith's own hosting site.
• Auto-scrolling capture: Capture images below what is visible on the screen, for example when capturing a lengthy web page.
• Drag-and-Drop: Snagit on Mac supports the Mac standard drag-and-drop function to popular applications like iWorks, Microsoft Office and more.

You can learn more about the new release of Snagit on Mac here.

Already own a license of Snagit on the PC? If you own Snagit v10, you're also entitled to a free copy of Snagit on Mac. If you're a new user, you pay just one price for a license of Snagit on Windows and Mac ($49.95). If you have an older version of Snagit on the PC, you can upgrade a single user license to Snagit v10 and get Snagit on Mac for only $24.95. More users or questions? Contact sales.

Ready to try out Snagit for Mac? Download the 30 day, fully functional eval here.

And, TechSmith extends a huge thank you to our 100,000 beta testers! Our products are better because of you! Please continue to send us feedback for future releases.

What do you think of the new release of Snagit on the Mac?

In this post I want to give you a little behind-the-scenes update about what's been happening on the Mac side. Later, I'll do Windows.

Otto, our Mac dev, has been up to his eyeballs in deep-level code. His mission? Make Jing smaller, use less CPU, and squash a few little bugs that are annoying but not annoying enough to make the effort to contact Tech Support.

Here's a run down of what Otto's been working on. Note that it's not released publicly yet:

• If you took a capture with Jing but canceled it, Jing would still consume CPU. Now, if you're not actively using Jing it will idle at 0.0% or very very close to 0. Nice!

• Completed switch to libcurl (or cURL). This has to do with the way Mac Jing implements FTP. Results? A better SFTP solution and Jing is about 1 MB smaller--down to a sleek 5.6 MB.
• Has this ever happened to you? You use a hotkey to initiate a capture and when you click and drag, instead of selecting a region it grabs the whole window and moves the selection area? Not a big deal right? Just cancel...it always works the second time... But no! It's kind of annoying and Otto fixed that too.
• Finally, have you ever made a selection, but had no crosshairs? It still works, just odd that there's no crosshairs. Well, that should be fixed too.

Everyone who has given feedback about performance issues should know that the team has been rolling up their sleeves and making improvements. Most people will never notice or appreciate them, however, it's those small things that can really add up to create a faster, more consistent, and pleasurable experience.

Once we wrap up these "under the hood improvements" and complete our testing, we'll start work on a new cool feature and ship it. Now, that's going to take a while but does it sound like a plan?

We released some new software updates today. It's a free update for Camtasia Studio 7 users and Camtasia for Mac users. There's a number of new things, but the highlight is probably the captioning improvements. Camtasia Studio and Camtasia Relay (a server-based product) support speech to text. Camtasia for Mac didn't have caption support before today, and Camtasia Studio has really improved the ease and efficiency of adding captions.

And remember, on the PC side, Jing SWF or MP4 videos can go straight to Camtasia Studio. Another good way to use Jing and Camtasia Studio together is to have a bunch of people create Jing videos, then send them to a person using Camtasia Studio to edit and caption them. Jing-created MP4's can be opened in Camtasia for Mac too.

If you're interested in learning more about what's new in the Camtasia products today, I recommend you visit our Visual Lounge blog. Let us know what you think!

Jing currently requires Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.0 or higher. In the next couple of months or so, when the next Jing release comes out, if you don't have .NET 3.5 SP1 (service pack 1) or higher, you'll be prompted to install it before you can upgrade and use Jing.

One way I check to see if I already have .NET 3.5 SP1 on my computer is to use the Add/Remove Programs feature in the Control Panel and see if it's in the list. Here's what it looks like on my machine: http://screencast.com/t/NWNjYjQxZ

If you'd like, you can get the .NET upgrade in advance. In fact, it should be a recommended suggestion from Microsoft if you ever use their Auto Update or www.windowsupdate.com process. You can also download it directly from here.

This higher .NET requirement is important for a number of reasons including better Jing performance, the ability to leverage some nice features Microsoft has made available, and improvements that let us develop Jing faster.

We appreciate your understanding and hope you'll spread the word if you can. Thanks!

We wanted to give our Mac users a heads-up that going forward Jing will still work on Mac OS 10.4, but it won't be getting any more updates. Future updates to Jing (and Jing Pro) will only support 10.5 and higher.

To be clear, we're not just going to leave 10.4 users hung out to dry. When the next update comes out in the next few months, the current version of Jing is going to hang around for 10.4 users--but you won't get any new features going forward.

There's a number of reasons for this decision--here's a few of them:

• From a user's point of view, we're going to be able to leverage some cool things with Apple's Core Animation and Core Image technology. Basically, Jing's going to take better advantage of the graphics card. (Your actual Jing captures will look the same but Jing itself should perform and look better in the future.)
• This technology would also facilitate improving the History should we decide to do that someday.
• A final benefit I'll mention is that by dropping support for 10.4 and being able to tap into some of what 10.5 and higher gives us, developing Jing will go faster.

We hope this will be of minimal impact. We wanted to give you some warning, but let us know your thoughts--and if you know any OS 10.4 users, maybe you can pass this information on? Thanks!